The search starts from a predisposition to seek, to see more than what the eyes let us see; to feel, and then try to translate the sense into alternative views to the use in order to unmask an invisible world that is full of riches.
Since the Enlightenment, as a result of the prevailing rationalism of the s. XVIII, the value of things passes through demonstrable facts, absolute determinations, the tax on the model of objective knowledge, as orthodox, to see the world. Despite the relativization of this knowledge, which involves post-structuralist criticism from the last third of the twentieth century, rationality remains the yardstick, in most cases, calibrates the validity of the proposals. This has made us get used to measuring what we see under specific parameters, these, accepted as adequate, have conditioned the personal and collective view to cut any skein of thread that could make us see more than the sovereign realm of the visible and the rational, imposed by that enlightened world, established as such. However, the acceptance of multiplicity and variability makes conscious the hierarchy and the reduction imposed by the prejudices imposed by the dominant culture. That is why looking for the hiding places of the territory, with an intention that might seem almost a child's game, in reality consists of venturing into new looks. The need to seek allies in the understanding of what surrounds us leads us to reinterpret our own connection with the observed, basing processes of revelations that make discover things of ourselves that we did not know, while, just for that reason, also revealing a territory previously hidden.
Taking into account this, the search focuses on two particular territories, the Bay of Cádiz and the Lagoon of Venice. Both are hybrid territories, in the sense that they belong to both the sea and the land. This fact is decisive, since it means that its limits can not be read under parameters of use. Finding water where we were convinced that there could be a land with a matter between mud, grass and water, predisposes our body to measure space from itself, to recalibrate its measurement parameters and to put itself to the test with the territory.
The methodology for recognition is based on a series of witnesses that reveal characteristics of said places. From them the warp that is revealed only supports the thesis of the complexity that characterizes these territories, which increases just at the moment of its discovery, since what is revealed alters the discovered characteristics, leaving now the look poured, enriched by searching for such witnesses, multiply to find new hiding places previously unimaginable.
So the witnesses in turn serve as tools extrapolated to other territories. The inevitable opening of our gaze, incited by the Bay and the Lagoon, pushes necessarily to new readings on the normalized territories; and it is that the relationships revealed reveal hidden or undervalued potentialities until now. That is why this thesis tries in part to be also an atlas of tools, techniques and suggestions that allow to test what was discovered, in the territories of study, on the rest of the territories, serving for the practice and knowledge of the architectural project.