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Dédale

In Lisbon, some neighborhoods such as the Alfama or the Mouraria, little impacted by the earthquake in 1755, can still let us imagine the maze of lanes of the whole city from which the inhabitants have had to find an escape route. While the Baixa district, designed under Pombal's rule for the reconstruction of the city, shows one of the first urbanizations of a modern city in Europe in the early stage of Enlightenment, a rationalization that was beginning to spread in European mentalities, made possible here in response to the near complete destruction of the city center. If the uniformity of the buildings came with the enforcement of the first earthquake-resistant building standards, this urbanization was perceived by the population of the time as authoritarian, scattering the social fabric into a public administration at the scale of the city, dividing the streets by trades.

The lines of the maze are those of the Minotaur's such as represented in plural Roman mosaics, notably in the ancient Roman site of Conimbriga near Lisbon. In Greek mythology, it is Poseidon, god responsible for the rough seas and earthquakes, who, as a response for an offense caused by the king Minos, sent a bull on earth in order to mate with Minos' wife, giving birth to the Minotaur for which the labyrinth was built.

The sections of cutter blades form the basic unit for an axonometric projection in the architectural drawing. Conceived in such an oblique design in order to cut the plan surface of the paper, it is there only by these inclined lines that, put flat on the plan, the blades will break with the drawing and the two dimensional representation by creating, from certain angles, an illusion of elevation, giving the impression of an architectural model.

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mosaic