Compor o espaço da casa: entre a procura da Ordem e a construção do Significado

Abstract

The purpose of the following dissertation is to understand the design process of the House. In order to accomplish that, we were confident that it was possible to learn through other practices, meaning, not by designing another house, but by understanding and carefully looking to the path taken in the construction of other houses. With the goal of capturing what does make (or keeps making) a house, we elected Álvaro Siza as the main character of the story we want to tell. Based on four of 'his' houses, built between the 50's and the 70's, we try to expose and uncover a particular way of thinking and doing, assured that such study holds important lessons on the enrichment of the idea of Home, and consequently, of Architecture. So, the designing moment becomes the 'map' that establishes the references to decode the creative gesture, putting us in the center of this process, over which we look around. As a representation of the effort to organize and determine architecturally (at a specific moment in history), the elements of a problem according to a purpose, the architecture project shows how everything we see gives us references, and that is precisely from the relations between things that we feed the composition of the house's space. In Siza's case, such 'map' is even more interesting, in the way that it allows not only to visualize what exists, and the present moment intention, but also to see the traces of what was left behind in the constitution of an answer - the search for order. As to the house's final form, it becomes useless to settle any kind of rule(s) that can embrace the variability of situations that one can come across, let alone aim to a conception of an 'ideal home'. What we can do, while considering the projects in all their dimensions, is to examine the choices, transformations, and intentionality of certain actions in order to create new relations, and how that was translated into houses that touch us. Therefore, the perspective here shown attaches an extreme importance to the cementation of a way of doing, which incorporates and assembles the values considered to be essential in the definition of something whose meaning is being built - the House. To conclude, this study hopes to be a contribution to what could be the enhancement of a strategy applied to the architecture project; starting from the stage of the design process, this analysis goes all the way to the visit and talk with the inhabitants of each house, trying to clarify how, opposing to what is fake and merely representative, the real dwelling experience only emerges in a place that is constantly developing and remains in construction, just like ourselves - living organism.