Critical Concrete - Associação de Experimentação Cultural

Critical Concrete is an emerging educational and social initiative, funded in 2016, that stands out of the regular dynamisms of real estate development and promotes new mechanisms to rehabilitate social housing, and improve public and cultural spaces shared by low-income communities. It advocates a fundamental right to adequate housing, that is often disregarded due to lack of public resources or political regulation. Co-Lateral, its project space for co-working and co-building, sharing culture, and engaging the surrounding community. The space hosts open cultural events such as winter screenings, markets, workshops, twisted with the social sciences and architectural experimentation. The production space is framed around the social activity of the neighbourhood, makes tools and workshop space available to the community and organises woodworking and metalworking workshops. We want to foster the sharing of skills and knowledge between experienced practitioners and surrounding communities, material reuse and sustainable, ecological constructions techniques. Along with this tool bank and workshops, the space is offering coworking spaces for creative minds, architects, urbanists, cultural actors, conceptually connected to our framework. We also work in tight collaboration with the local associations, to offer popular cultural formats, such as screenings, cooking classes, discussions, twisted with critical content. It reflects on increasing popularisation and influx of global capital that causes social polarization, rising rents and cost of living in the city of Porto and beyond. Instead of building for, we build with. The most impactful format that Critical Concrete runs is the annual international Summer school - Practice & Theory of Sustainable & Social Architecture. Families in-need, students and interdisciplinary group of mentors, researchers and practitioners team-up to demonstrate the collective power capable of changing people’s housing habits. The initiative emerged from a dissensus with prevailing building industry practice, which is one of the most damaging industry in the planet. That is also one of our motivation to collect, invent and promote alternative building solutions. It questions the political meaning of sustainability in architecture, which has ambiguous connotations. Critical Concrete follows its own understanding of sustainable architecture: long lasting and easily repairable structures, made of locally sourced materials and upcycled trash. Critical Concrete aims to be accessible to broad audience of DIY builders in the future. See more about our research on sustainable techniques on our blog/research lab.