Poética del abandono: Siza's Unfinished Hotel in Panticosa

In 2001, Álvaro Siza was commissioned to design a sports hotel at the Balneario de Panticosa in the Aragonese Pyrenees. The project aimed to minimize visual impact, resulting in a powerful, fragmented volume that interacts with sober, dynamic interiors shaped by light. In 2008, weeks before completion, the developer went bankrupt amid the global financial crisis, leaving the structure exposed to weather and nature. Iñaki Bergera, a professor at the University of Zaragoza, has documented the gradual decay of the High Performance Sports Center and adjacent aparthotel since 2011. His photographs, along with sketches and Siza's testimony, are compiled in a new publication by Ediciones Asimétricas, revealing an unexpected harmony between the abandoned architecture and its territory, suggesting a new 'poetics of abandonment.' Bergera, who holds a doctorate from the University of Navarra and studied at Harvard, has extensively explored the intersection of photography, architecture, and landscape.