Harmonia e Arquitetura. Um novo olhar sobre a obra de Álvaro Siza

Abstract

The concept of harmony is not, in contemporary times, often used when referring to architecture. It is more familiar to us to hear that an architecture is beautiful, than harmonious. Its use is more common when we refer to music. However, when we reach a point where we observe architecture and nothing can be changed without it losing the essence it has achieved, we are facing harmony, achieved through proportion, in the relationship between the parts, and through a series of regulating strokes that allow regulating not only the internal relationships of the work, but also those it establishes with its surroundings, achieving stability in architecture through the design of geometric relationships, namely alignments that coordinate different parts of the project. Since Classical Antiquity, writings have appeared whose objective is to unveil the secret of proportion in architecture, an attempt to decipher the universal laws in order to obtain a structure, a rule that allows the design of good architecture. In the Middle Ages, geometric strokes would be predominantly used, strokes that could not be reduced to whole numbers, such as the diagonal of the square for the length (square root of two). The numerical strokes gain strength in the Renaissance, from a revival of the thought of Plato and Pythagoras, and the project is guided by the idea of a universal harmony present in whole numbers, transversal to all architecture and latent in all forms, whether natural or man-made. In this paradigm, architecture comes to be seen as a science in which all parts of the building (interior and exterior) are integrated in the same system of mathematical and musical proportions, and the architect is not free to use a system of proportions of his choice, since these must be reconciled with a higher order, a cosmic order. This point of view begins to be refuted from the 17th century on, as time progresses and a humanist approach to architecture develops. The belief of an order that would be at the base of all creations was being abandoned, following the argument that it is not possible to consider a law that originates a good proportion, since it is perceived by the human eye and it is not properly trained to understand the three dimensions of the building simultaneously. The proportion then became, according to Wittkower, the subject of aesthetic, personal and relative judgment. Since then, harmony in architecture has ceased to be a dogma and has become an option, sometimes associated with a whim. However, I believe that harmony should be understood as the conquest of a dimension in architecture where transformations, whether geometric or proportional-musical, manage to dialogue among themselves, establishing order in the chaos of will, not promoting a lack of creativity of the design attitude, but rather a reason for the existence of ideas.