Language, sites and types: a consideration of the work of Alvaro Siza

Abstract

Siza's architecture is remarkable for its precise accommodation to sites. Since the 1970s it has shown a more explicit reliance upon typological forms. Both aspects of his work suggest an architecture anchored to history. Yet, for all the importance that site and type seem to play in Siza's work, they emerge as strange protagonists. Although tightly calibrated to site, Siza's architecture reveals the remoteness of the past, establishing an intricate contrast between itself and the underlying site. Types are deployed, but the hierarchies of our movement through them, of implied architectural promenades, seem to occur against their grain - as if the historical orders manifest in types were inherited instruments of a remote and somewhat alien past. This article delineates these phenomena in Siza's work, and reveals their genealogy in the historical milieu out of which Siza emerged.