Architecture as representation. Notes on Álvaro Siza’s anthropomorphism

Although following in the wake of the Modern Movement tradition, Álvaro Siza Vieira’s architectural research moves along the thin red line between abstraction and representation. The apparent arbitrariness of some of his compositions is primarily an expression of his attention to the perception of a moving subject that never translates into merely illusionistic devices. Yet, in the last two decades of the 20th century, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic presences began to haunt his designs and buildings. The keys to understanding this phase of Siza’s creative trajectory reside in his metaphorical and analogical approach to design, testified by his texts, his hypertrophic graphic activity, his production as a designer and, most of all, as a sculptor. On one hand, his words and sketches reveal the tension and negotiation between architecture form and the human/animal body; on the other hand, his objects and sculptures result as intermediate moments of experimentation and clarification by responding the ergonomic demands through the semantic economy of objet trouvée. Through these two interests, Siza’s architectural anthropomorphism is here analyzed in relationship with the visual and mental effects on the observers, interpreted as both an opportunity for a theatrical architecture parlant and as a transition towards a new grade of poetic abstraction.