Habitar Siza: a experiência e interacção dos residentes com a arquitectura e as microtecnologias de Álvaro Siza

This project looks at the way residents of housing designed by Álvaro Siza experience, and interact with, their apartments’ spatial layout, the buildings’ public spaces and housing micro-technologies as well as their buildings’ social status as tourist attraction in their everyday life.
Siza’s architecture has for long been appraised as paying great attention to local traditions, architectural pre-existences and the genius loci (Testa 1984, Frampton 1999, 2002,
Jodidio 2013) as well as to participatory methods of architectural design (Fleck 1999, Bandeirinha 2007, Rodrigues 2015), yet surprisingly little research has been carried out on
residents’ reception and appropriation of his architecture. This project fills such research gap by focusing on the relationship between Siza’s historically-informed architecture and its
appropriation by residents, a relationship understood here in the sense of recent developments in architectural geography which highlight the way users and the material or
technological elements of housing co-constitute intricate processes of adaptation and possession making the event of ‘home’ (Lees 2001, Llewellyn 2004, Jacobs 2006, Kraftl 2010).
This relationship will be studied across the social and wealth spectrum, from the low-income population for whom the Bouça estate in Porto was originally designed, to the low-to-
middle income population of Malagueira in Évora, through to the very high-income population, or ‘super-rich’, of Terraços de Bragança in Lisbon. The three cases will allow us to
investigate:
1) the evolving social composition of each development, connecting it to the dynamics of gentrification related to living in a building designed by a star architect present at Bouça or
to the influx of foreign high-net worth individuals (HNWIs) present at Terraços de Bragança;
2) the extent to which the architectural principles enunciated at the moment of design, including the participatory modes of design brought to the architectural project at Bouça and
Malagueira, incorporated residents’ social and cultural patterns, and how were they subsequently experienced;
3) the practiced architecture of individuals in their homes, including here the way small technologies such as window openers or door knobs or techniques such as those of roofing
designed by Siza are integrated in everyday modes of inhabitation, in a type of ‘polyvocal’ study of architecture enabled by Jacobs et al’s (2006a) SUYH Show Us Your Home
methodology; but also the experience of infrastructure, seen for instance in the way public structures like the ‘walking viaduct/infrastructure conduit’ at Malagueira are used by
residents;
4) and finally residents’ reception of their homes being a tourist attention (Kraftl 2009), with associations related to architectural configurations ranging from open public spaces
amenable to ‘tourist peeking’ at Bouça and ‘tourist wandering’ at Malagueira to urban seclusion enabling strategies of ‘social concealment’ by the super-rich (Atkinson 2015) at
Terraços de Bragança.
Conceptually situated at the intersection of Geographies of Architecture, Science and Technology Studies of the Built Environment and Urbanism, it looks at Siza’s ideas of designing
for an ‘inter-classist’ city (Ascensão 2016) in concrete sites, fleshing out the under-researched process of a lived architecture. As Siza has stated, the architect’s work and “words
finish the moment buildings are delivered to residents” (Fleck 1999: 87). This project focusses on the process which then starts, giving voice to the two hitherto silent agents – the
materialities and technologies left in the building by the architect, on the one hand, and residents themselves, on the other – and fleshing out the interaction between the two.
To reach such analysis of architectural schemes from multiple viewpoints, or architectural polyvocalism (Llewellyn 2004), the research will be articulated in three broad phases,
corresponding to seven work tasks (see in detail, 3.2.2). Phase I (Contextualisations) will include the architectural, planning and historical contextualization of each case, including
archival work on Siza’s writings and drawings, but also surveying the social composition of residents. Phase II (Observations) will include in-depth interviews, ethnographic ‘house
visits’ and elicitation through self-presentation video and photography sessions with residents. Phase III (Analysis and disseminations) will disseminate research through academic
outputs, a research website with residents’ viewpoints and a photographic exhibition with their elicited ‘house visits’.
This interdisciplinary project bridges geography and anthropology to architecture and art photography. Its heterogeneous nature is reflected in the team members’ disciplinary
backgrounds. In addition, one PhD and two MSc holders will be hired. The project will be advised by a Steering Committee formed by leading scholars in architectural geography and
urban studies.