Resumen de Álvaro Siza Vieira’s Santa Maria church: Harmony in the conflict between tradition and innovation
Through Santa Maria Church, we reflect on the essential reading that Siza makes of what church architecture can be, as a religious place of meeting and communion, considering its morphology, spatiality, and contextualization in its different qualities, both visible and invisible, stressing the importance of the “forces of the place” for this project. In this work, with vernacular, modernist, and expressionist roots, that place values on both the aspects of traditional Portuguese architecture and the modernist and contemporary proposals. Siza proposes a “sliding theory,” characterized by adapting to the place circumstances and times. It is evidently established in a dialogic relationship with the design process. In the church, the dialogic and dialectic relationships of oppositions generate an “unsettling” or tense formal relationship, translated in spatial terms into a dynamic of conflicts and visible and invisible ambiguities on a perceptive, formal, and symbolic level. However, simplicity, balance, and harmony are present in the formal and material dispossession, the simplicity and domesticity of the environment, and the feeling of welcome and communion in its interior. The church is presented as a dialogic environment that encompasses aspects related to the place, the traditional church, domestic architecture, and contemporary architectural culture, where harmony is established in conflict and builds an inspiring “in-between place” of communion between the sacred and the profane, tradition and innovation, presence and present absence.
