Blues of our time

Blues of our time is an installation by Oficina Pedrêz, which occupies the courtyard in front of Galeria Municipal do Porto, consists of five benches on wheels that invite visitors to stop, look, touch and rest.

These functional sculptures, made up of an oval steel structure, have been filled with hemp and charcoal concrete, covered in a thin paste of wax and cobalt blue pigment. The colour unfolds in different shades and seems to reflect the sky, but also the world, in all its dimensions.

The duo behind the project, Matilde Cabral and Francisco Fonseca, conceived the different blues according to multiple meanings: from the ideas of Louis Kahn when who said that “a square is nothing more than a façade facing the sky”, to the reference to the blue objects that, inexplicably, resisted the fires in Maui, Hawaii; one can even recognise on those surfaces the continental masses and oceans that permeate the planet.

Oficina Pedrêz is an experimental architecture studio in the fields of material research and human ecologies. It was founded by the fashion designer Matilde Cabral and the architect Francisco Fonseca in 2020, following the fusion of the “Porto Fashion Office” development studio and the “Skrei” experimental architecture office. Pedrêz takes its name from a breed of chicken native to northern Portugal and Cantabria – the pedrês chicken – in recognition of its fundamental role in the human and urban ecology of these regions.

Photography: Renato Cruz Santos