Inhabiting auteur architecture: tracing the residents’ experience of Álvaro Siza’s Bouça housing estate

Abstract

This paper explores what it is like to live in a celebrated buildingcreated by a renowned architect. Drawing on conceptualizations ofhome and dwelling as cultural as well as sociotechnical events, itintersects such theoretical lineages with the literature on living infamous residential buildings and asks how individual inhabitation isconstrued by residents. Based on ethnographic research at ÁlvaroSiza’s Bouça housing estate in Porto, Portugal, it shows the influ-ence on everyday life of elements such as the material value ofcelebrated housing, gentrification and architectural tourism in suchplaces, as well as of inside elements such as the experience ofresidential space conceived by a famous architect or the interactionwith ‘micro-technologies’ in the building. We argue that inhabitingauteur architecture is a multi-faceted cultural, sociotechnical andpolitical event, yet one that is reworked distinctly according to classand individual takes on the building’s social history. In doing so, thepaper’s contribution is to re-insert class back into a networked,decentred analysis of architecture in geographical studies.