DRAWING AND ITS MEANING FOR SIZA: IMAGINING THE EVIDENCE

Abstract

Álvaro Siza Vieira (1933 - ) was always an architect identified with the intensive use of gestural drawing as a design instrument for his architecture. This characteristic, added to the expressiveness of it and the latent correspondence of his design drawings (sketches, or esquissos, as it is called in Portugal) with the architecture subsequently built, raised the interest of this researcher in deepening the observable relations between two architectural moments: the perception of a graphic object that expresses intentions and the subsequent perception of the space built from these intentions. The need for a consistent theoretical basis to establish dialogues that can express evidence of such phenomena, in the different architectures by Siza, led the research to the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938). This article, which originates from a chapter of the master's dissertation and is developed under the guidelines of the doctorate (which in turn deals with the problem of sketching for architecture by seeking to answer the following question: what is the potential power of representation of the architect's intentionality in a sketch, in his objective of carrying out the finished work?), focuses on the analysis of the first phenomenon. This perception of Siza's sketches occurs under the division of two proposed categories, but which in no way encompass the entirety of the architect's vocabulary, namely: “human figures” and “meditative fugues”. These categories originate, from the point of view of the observer of the sketches, from two of the most identifiable recurrences of figurative appearances in his drawings, but which, as is common to all classifications in the field of arts, often overlap. The article also proposes an approach to the sketches at the same time as reading the architect's own considerations of his design process. Such correlations, under the structure of phenomenological thought based on the concepts of “intentionality” and “evidence” in Edmund Husserl, developed mainly in Cartesian Meditations (1931), invite us to adjust our gaze to gestural graphic representations that allow us to delve deeper into certain perceptive experiences that reveal the potential of the sketch, as a projective instrument for the rapid revelation of “consciousness” - also as understood by Husserl. Finally, the doctoral research uses as a supporting methodology Husserlian phenomenology applied directly to the object, the psychology of form, visual perception, cognition/creative process and also critical analyses of the architect studied himself, as well as his thoughts expressed in his already published interviews and has so far produced academic articles presented in seminars.