Porta Nova da Alhambra: Das razões profundas do projecto no tempo longo do processo de criação arquitectónica

Abstract

In scope of the International Competition of ideas for the Atrium of Alhambra, organized in between 2010 and 2011 by the Council of the Alhambra and the Generalife, Álvaro Siza and Juan Domingo Santos developed a project named New Gate. The project and the creative process correspond to the study object and to the subject of our PhD final thesis. The choice of the case followed the intuition that a project thought for a place like the Alhambra of Granada, palatine city absolutely dense of references and built in a long time of tensions, of transitions and synthesis of two different cultures as the occidental and as the islamic, and developed by Architects like Álvaro Siza and like Juan Domingo Santos, also them formed by dense memories of life and of professional experiences, would be exhaustive and extremely suggestive. We proposed ourselves to develop a PhD final thesis in Architecture about a project and its creative process, without theoretical frameworks that could change the thoughts around it. After the analysis of the drawings, of the texts and of the models, we built a puzzle that could tell us about the metamorphosis of the ideas and shapes through the time. We gave life to the process following its tracks and we learnt to listen the voice of the project. Starting from the time that corresponds to the project in itself, we arrived in a time that corresponds to a previous formation based on memories of experiences of the Alhambra, memories that allows us to think, but never explain neither define, the project. Relating precise information of the long time of the project, we understand that in the first drawings that define the identity of the New Gate are arriving themes that belong mainly to the places of the Alhambra and that in the later drawings that study the proposal in deep are arriving references from other projects of the authors. And if the project for the New Gate of the Alhambra is a synthesis of previous experiences in relation with the place and with the programme, it represents also a continued theme for the projects done after, being possible to built an idea of continuity. To this empirical method of design, at the same time always different and always equal, we associate a knowledge accumulated through a long time.