Paper long abstract:

Following J. Thomas (2004) I would like to propose the term "traditions of practice" as an operational concept that seeks to question the transmission of ways of doing through practice, more specifically, through the making of architecture. I am not referring only to the digging of a ditch or to the construction of a wall, but to a broader constellation of relationships in which they became built spaces; and to the way those spaces themselves are under permanent construction and transformation. Tradition will not be understood here as a non-reflexive continuation of actions or icons, as a set of crystallized and formalized practices that are meant to give identity from the exterior to a certain community. I would rather like to discuss the study of traditions of practice of specific architectural devices that through this approach do not reveal functions, but the construction of stories through processes of repeated practice. As Derrida said, repetition is never imitation of the same, but repetition is always different from what was previously repeated. So, tradition is created and recreated, revisited every time by practice through the construction of circular units at Castanheiro do Vento, a III millennium walled enclosure, (where slabs and ceramic fragments, land and water, wood, and small animal bones meet, inserted in a network of relationships between past and present), or through the excavation, by trowel, of those circular structures at Castanheiro do Vento.