Álvaro Siza Vieira

TRAVELLING

Juan Domingo Santos

In a conversation with Álvaro Siza, he told me that as a child, his father rented a house in a valley with magnificent views to recover from a respiratory illness. He had to rest and only had medical authorisation to look out onto a terrace. At first, he was happy contemplating the valleys that he could see, but after a while, spotting the landscape became a routine act devoid of surprise that became increasingly tedious, so he decided to establish a game consisting of opening and closing part of the shutters, creating fragmented visions of the landscape with different views every day (1) .

In Alfred Hitchcock's film 'Rear Window', the main character, James Stewart, is a wheelchair-bound photographer who, to keep himself occupied, observes the world that opens up before him from inside his flat, framed by a window. A 'voyeur' who watches fragments of life through the lens of his camera. The room and the window appear in the film as a single, immense set where architecture and life are seen through the eyes of the same character. Siza's attitude, like that of James Stewart, depicts raw curiosity and shows that partial and fragmentary images can evoke a recognisable atmosphere of emotions and sensations without having to resort to the full picture - imagination will do the rest (2). Outside, a repertoire of various situations and events, of stories in which apparently nothing ever happens, become a small world that opens up to us under controlled exposure. Perhaps for Álvaro Siza, building means investigating this realm of relationships from a personal and introspective point of view (3). During our conversation, he talked about establishing a different order between things and history, and his fascination with a certain enigma in the relationships between the outside world and what we imagine of it (4). Nothing is small or big, everything contains a world that is complex and sophisticated at the same time, full of multiple connections that are simultaneously embodied in his works, reaching a state of astonishing naturalness (5).

The camera's movement at the beginning of 'Rear Window' shows a sequence of concatenated spaces and activities, starting with a fragment of a courtyard, followed by the movement of a dancer and a woman walking her dog, and then entering a room through a window and panning over a broken camera sitting on a table until it stops on the sweaty face of the protagonist. This unique camera movement provides enough information to convey where we are, who the protagonist is and what is interesting about the architectural setting. When, at the end of the film, the killer enters the room and asks James Stewart 'What do you want from me?', the latter, not knowing what to answer, and driven solely by curiosity and boredom, has to defend himself from the killer's attack with his photographer's tools, flashing his camera and hitting him, using his own elements related to the character or to the places of the action, because otherwise, as Hichtcock said, 'I have the feeling that I am wasting something if I don't use these things', unnecessary losses that lead to creating with minimum energy and continuity while using the places and things that surround us (6 and 7).

Siza's works are always invitations to look out of a window, to use a peculiar way to enter or leave a place, and also, as Juhani Pallasmaa would say, to climb a ladder, lean against a wall or lie down on the sofa to look at the ceiling and to certain elements that at first glance go unnoticed (8). A sequence of experiences and events where architecture opens up to talk with the landscape, with the history of places, with memory and also with the most insignificant things, aware of the 'debilitating impossibility of finishing it'.

As the sculptor Cabrita Reis said, 'we are what we want to be and that is called history', a set of windows that we open day by day to the spectacle of life.