ABSTRACT
Geographic atlases, since the work of Gerardus Mercator (1595), have always constituted one of the greatest human ambitions: to know and make known the Earth in its entirety, graphically restoring continents and seas. It is this ambition of total knowledge that makes the idea expand and appear, for example, anatomical atlases and also atlases of cities and architecture. However, the latter had to introduce a new question that consisted of selecting a representative universe that could mirror the total universe.
If the architecture treatises already selected and designed old buildings considered exemplary, as well as standard buildings, the first work that sets up an atlas of the built structures is the Recueil et Parallèle des édifices de tout genre, anciens et modernes by J-N-L Durand (1800). The centuries that followed are fruitful in the publication of works of an identical nature, more transversal such as the Encyclopédie de l’Urbanisme by Robert Auzelle (1947) or on more specific themes such as the works by Allan B. Jacobs on the streets (1993), by Susanne Komossa on the urban-blocks (2005), or by Andreas Lechner on the buildings (2021).
It is based on the support of all these experiences that one can today question the usefulness of an atlas of built structures, especially if understood as an essential instrument for reflection and project design, allowing critical readings and endless narratives conceived by the user. And it was in this framework that the question arose of how to conceive and organise a collection that would group the unlimited variety of buildings, where we propose a concise vision based on three approaches chosen as references: the programme, the context and the time, each one organised by categories, applied to a concrete cultural and geographical universe, Portugal, and using material that counts 120 main reference cases studies and about 782 parallel comparison cases.
