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Siza uses a variety of strategies to "attack" this integrity, enabling him to persist in constructing a relationship between site and intervention (as each project should be called in his work) that binds them without naturalizing their relationship. He also deploys certain strategies that metaphorically present the alienness of the type, as an inherited formal construct, in relation to a subject that cannot see itself reflected in that inherited order of architecture. |
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The Pavilion for the Faculty of Architecture is a U-shaped building,
a species of the three-sided courtyard (figures 26–29). It is set at one
end of an enclosed garden. The garden is oblong and its entry is on one
of the long sides toward the far end from ![]() The building has no base but for a thin black line of tile set flush in the white wall, nor is the ground in any way specially prepared for the building. It is significant that the building's figure, on one side and at the back, is caught up in the geometrical organization of the ground plane, but there is no sense of accommodation at the point of contact between building and ground: at the short end of its arms and along the side of the far arm the building sets right down into grass as if it were a model or play object set down upon a living-room carpet. Perhaps habitual percourses around the edge of the garden drove the
logic of a corner entry, now hidden and far from everything else in the
garden. The inherited order of the object is treated with the kind of indifference
that we might imagine in reinhabiting a ruin, or building the new city
around it, as happens in Rome. New windows and doors are cut into an ancient
edifice, new street patterns are laid out with no necessary regard for
its original order or hierarchy or organization. It is as if the building
were a piece of nature to be colonized. I exaggerate to make my point,
because clearly each decision of dimension, shape, and location has been
considered. But the cumulative rhetorical effect seems to suggest these
purposeful contrasts and superimposed counterorders. The building is in
many ways, like the pool at Leca, |
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In the Carlos Siza house (figures 30 and 31), the effect of this artifice
of apparently aleatory relationships between different layers of order
is more radically visible. This project too is a pinched U. Its central
axis is marked by the living room's protruding bay window. Here too entry
is made casually from the corner, although in this case one enters into
a sort of ambulatory that enfolds the courtyard of the house. In this house
the "indifference" of site is more radical. The house sits on a raised
base. At a certain point along one edge of the site, the raised plot's
perimeter wall folds sharply back into the house, passing through one leg
of the U and conceptually cutting off three of the bedrooms from the rest
of the house. Through the typological figure, an element connected with
site passes in a formally disruptive fashion through its interior. Some
rather extraordinary readings are possible as a consequence of this event.
The three bedrooms seem to be simultaneously outside of the house and within
the garden precinct while still legibly within the figure of the U.
The courtyard, ![]() A third event of an entirely different sort is superimposed upon the
superimposition of site and type. An optical cone of vision is cut from
the center of the dining room window, twisting the geometry of two columns;
dimensioning along its trajectory the two opposite windows of the courtyard;
aligning, along radials drawn from the cone's vertex, the dividing walls
of three bedrooms; and popping out from the far side of the house a little
bay window of sorts. Vision is inscribed as another uncoordinated order
into the fabric of the building. The indifference of one order's logic
to that of another suggests the independence of each. The rhetorically
aleatory nature of their relationships suggests the foreignness of one to
the other—that is, they constitute an archeology of architecture,
represented by typological formations or as in Leca, with syntactical strategies,
site, and the order of the subject. Each is intimately bound to the other,
yet alien. |