Art with Life

“THE PSYCHOLOGIST WHO ONLY KNOWS PSYCHOLOGY, DOESN’T EVEN KNOW PSYCHOLOGY”

Let us dare in the freedom, for a few lines, to appropriate Professor Abel Salazar’s (1) famous phrase (2) , to make it the architectural, artistic and epistemological axiom underlying this presentation of the physical space, where knowledge about human nature is shared and developed daily.

Taking as its starting point an innovative pedagogical project, the concept took shape in the numerous lines and plans drawn by the hand of Manuel Tainha. Elevations, cuts, sketches and canvases created, from what could be a traditional gross mass of concrete, a space of rare beauty where “to the four facades of the traditional compositional precept was added … a fifth façade: the coverage.Andas such it is treated, since it can not only be seen in bird flight, but also provides a rich source of parietal light, with which it is associated with the interior environment.” (5)

In the author’s own words, this work was based on the “three master reasons of architecture: practical reason, theoretical reason, poetic reason” (6). Surely it was the latter that led him to invite Menez to create the tile panel that integrates one of the most beautiful and emblematic spaces of the faculty: the cloister of the patio.It is- we dare to say – an area of ​​Islamic inspiration where the shadows of the colonnaded features imprint the rhythm under which the blue angels dance and surrounds us with that tone of freshness and spiritual peace which we find only in the medieval Arab and monastic cloisters.

The tile panel, combined with the inner garden lake, is one of the main ex-libris of this architectural complex. On the front wall of the cloister are mimetically mirrored flocks of angels – made of brush strokes so slight and irregular that they seem to be tempera on paper – that lift us to another dimension and defy any merely physicist view of human nature.

Studying and working at the Faculty of Psychology is to enjoy a space that is not limited to perfect functionality, but where a multitude of doors open (if we let our gaze be lost in the multiple nooks and details) that lead us to other rational and emotional dimensions only possible by the awakening of the aesthetic dimension of our being.

In this way, the openness to other kinds of knowledge, characterizes the pedagogical vision of the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Lisbon, which also passes through daily coexistence, side by side, with art.

FPUL is an art space that invites you to knowledge and life.