IJUP08 - Universidade do Porto

The Courtyard and Siza’s Houses
H. Henriques 1
1 Department of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture, University of Porto, Portugal.
The aim of this study was to attend the issue of the courtyard housing. The houses of
Álvaro Siza serve as a motto for its deepening. From the analysis of these works it should
be possible to recognize the importance that the author gives to the courtyard, as a mean
for the settlement and link to the place.
From an overview about the important role that the courtyard represents in the history of
housing and of some of the recent research that has been over in the modern movement, we
begin with an individual analysis of each house. The confrontation and comparison with
other examples becomes necessary in order to understand the various means and ways of
use of the courtyard in the domestic space.
The six houses in this study are not in the same region, although a great part is placed in
the north of Portugal. They appear along the architectural production of Álvaro Siza.
Sometimes they reveal themselves as points of change or development in his language and
method - an evolution carried through the Portuguese constructive tradition, the influences
of some authors of the Modern Movement and the characteristics and cultural identity of
each place. The variance of elements and materials is produced facing a closed
composition, a sense of intimate environment of the house. The courtyard remains as an
archetype that shapes the space.
The study of the courtyard in the work of Siza is made with the desire to understand the
patio as his way of thinking and doing architecture, looking for to portray, in the study
cases, the features, expressions and feelings going through the project of interiorized
houses. With the impossibility of a complete analysis of the courtyard throughout all his
work, the chosen houses must be seen as examples that allow a particular approach to the
issue.
The study of those houses allows the observation of the formal and expressive mechanisms
that separate or approach the house to what involves it. The analysis will allow, perhaps, to
decipher the intentions and designs of Siza in choosing to turn the house on itself,
sometimes to hide it from the outside look, perhaps searching for a general harmony of the
space based on a relative or partial autonomy and an internal logic.
The patio allows the understanding of the house as an area of protection and refuge from
the outside world, but also as an area of representation - a static core where various
activities take place but also as a mean to divide and create hierarchies and gradations
between private and public, between the inside and outside.
The research of houses of a single author led us to a reflection on the predominance of the
courtyard in his work and, more particularly, about the continuity in his architecture. The
unquestionable quality and beauty of the examples led us to an experienced learning. At
the beginning of our work, the observation and visit of the houses showed the simplicity of
the occupation of the site and the naturalness with which each space is opened to inside - a
genuine synthesis of similar ways of life prevailed for the clear conception of the house as
interior space.
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