The Flickering Image. Representing Impermanence at Siza’s Piscina das Marés

As the tide advances and retreats, the threshold between land and water is continuously redefined. The architecture built along this edge is shaped by the same dynamic processes. Through Álvaro Siza’s Piscina das Marés in Leça da Palmeira, this contribution approaches coastal architecture as a series of mutable traces. The sea acts as a co-author, altering the built form and challenging assumptions of permanence and control. Reshaped by erosion and time, the work discloses itself only in fragments. Siza’s idea of a ‘flickering image’ captures this partiality, namely the impossibility of fixing the project in a definitive representation. This condition is translated into a visual inquiry through digital collage, understood as a critical device. By selecting, subtracting and recomposing elements, the graphic work does not document the pools but evokes their impermanence, interpreting the immaterial dimensions of architecture.