The wall as dwelling

Abstract

In a global zeitgeist that seems to navigate in treacherous half-words that materialize in walls of rigid concrete, what would architecture’s plan of action, a field that has always flirted with corporeal authoritarianism, with spatial rupture? I try to investigate, in the work of Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza, Piscina das Marés, how an architecture project understood as a wall can actively operate in the integration of a territory. How can the design of a project make the object transcend its essence, and become something else? Would it be possible to construct walls that approximate, and teach? I revisit, in a phenomenological narrative in Piscina das Marés, Siza’s work through a view not only inspired by the words of the Portuguese architect, but also by the theoretical concepts of place and time of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, the architect Louis Kahn and the artist Robert Smithson.