This essay examines Iñaki Bergera’s Poetics of Abandonment: Siza in Panticosa as a long-term photographic investigation into the unfinished High Performance Centre designed by Álvaro Siza in the Spanish Pyrenees. Rather than treating the work as a simple record of architectural decay, the essay argues that Bergera’s book offers a critical and poetic reflection on the relationship between architecture, photography, time, and landscape. The abandoned CAR building is presented as an architecture suspended between intention and entropy, completion and deterioration, failure and latent possibility. Through a restrained visual language, Bergera avoids both denunciation and nostalgia, adopting instead a precise, almost forensic mode of observation that reveals the contradictions of the site.
The essay highlights the importance of sequencing in the book, relating Bergera’s photographic journey to the idea of the promenade architecturale and to phenomenological understandings of spatial perception. The images guide the viewer through a mental and perceptual experience of the building, allowing photography to reconstitute movement, time, and atmosphere. Abandonment is interpreted not merely as physical decay but as a layered temporal condition, transforming the building into a palimpsest where traces of exposure, erosion, and incompletion coexist with the persistence of Siza’s architectural intentions.
The essay also introduces the notion of “false ruins” to describe structures that were never fully inhabited and whose ruinous appearance results from interrupted expectations rather than historical decline. In this context, Bergera’s photographs expose the economic, social, and political forces behind abandonment while preserving the dignity and ambiguity of the architecture. Ultimately, the essay presents Poetics of Abandonment as a significant contribution to debates on architectural photography, showing how photographic practice can act simultaneously as documentation, interpretation, and contemplation, and how abandoned architecture can become a privileged space for rethinking architectural meaning.
Cover Image: Poética del abandono: Siza en Panticosa by Iñaki Bergera