19 October 2011

“The Relationship between Arts” was the title of the lecture by Álvaro Siza Vieira at the opening class of the Faculty of Arts of the university of Porto. (Translation soon)

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Álvaro Siza Vieira and his Style

I would like to start my discussion of the Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza’s work by first considering some texts frequently cited in discussions of his projects: one by Siza himself, one by his mentor Fernando Tavora, [...]:

My architecture does not have a pre-established language nor does it establish a language. It is a response to a concrete problem, a situation in transformation in which I participate… In architecture, we have already passed the phase during which we thought that the unity of language would resolve everything. A pre-established language, pure, beautiful, does not interest me.
—Alvaro Siza (1978) [Peter Testa, The Architecture of Alvaro Siza (Oporto, Portugal: Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade do Porto, 1968), p. 39]

Those who advocate a return to styles of the past or favor a modern architecture and urbanism for Portugal are on a bad path… “style” is not of importance; what counts is the relation between the work and life, style is only the consequence of it.
—Fernando Tavora (1962) [Paulo Varela Gomes, "Quatre Batailles en Faveur d'une Architecture Portuguaise" Europalia 91: Portugal Points de Repere: Architecture du Portugal (Brussels: Fondation pour l'Architecture, 1991), pp. 41–42 [my translation]

[...] All three texts reveal currents of feeling and thought that are distrustful of language. [...] Language has its own independent logic. We tell stories about ourselves, define experiences, judge events, and give voice to our feelings. Yet what we tell ourselves follows on the structure of language as given to us. The murky liquid dynamism of life is poured into the ready mold of language without convincing us that something is not left out in the shape assumed. The events of our life take on the form of known narrative structures. We imagine in the events of our lives the shadow of a bildungsroman, a cinematic melodrama or life as advertised. Ready words name our sentiments and we love, miss, and grow angry—whatever—according to the elaborate histories connected to the words that name these sentiments. Meaning—even that conveyed by a rudimentary individual word—is divided up in certain arbitrary ways, as a simple attempt at translation from one language to another readily demonstrates. Although inevitably and endlessly falling prey to the preformed patterns of thought, intimations of another life shimmer out of thought’s reach on the horizon of consciousness. [...]
Alvaro Siza’s and Fernando Tavora’s statements suggest that something analogous has occurred in architecture. Tavora rejects what he calls “style,” which is really expression that no longer seems properly linked to its content—expression that seems superfluous to meaning, mere flourishes. He instead favors something that will grow out of the relationship between “work and life.” Siza, a student of Fernando Tavora and a lifelong friend, echoes the older architect’s sentiment: he rejects “pre-established language” and seeks to respond to a “concrete problem, a situation in transformation in which I participate.” In architecture they aim for that utopia where form would be neither an arbitrary inheritance nor an arbitrary system of forms, but would grow directly out of our needs, and those needs’ interaction with our environments, and most generally (if also most vaguely) out of who we are.

Yet what does all that mean? It reminds me of an analogous ambition ascribed to the “American action painting” of Pollack, Kline, de Kooning, etc., by their champion and critic, Harold Rosenberg. He said that this painting “at its inception was a method of creation—not a style or look that pictures strove to achieve.” [Harold Rosenberg, "The Concept of Action Painting," Artwork and Packages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 213]. The paintings were records of human gesture unmediated by the treacherous pressure of thought and preconceived images. These paintings, like the track left behind a figure skater, recorded life itself unfolding.
But what could this mean in relationship to architecture, an art that is by its very definition premeditated? First we draw, then someone following what amounts to instructions must build. Architecture is neither a very spontaneous process nor is it very receptive to those patent contrivances that try to transpose “automatic” drawings to the built realm. To understand how these statements, or theoretical ambitions, relate to architecture, and to understand what consequences they finally had on Alvaro Siza’s work, we will have to trace two parallel histories. The first relates to the understanding developed by the previous generation of Portuguese architects—among whom Tavora played a significant role—of Portuguese vernacular architecture, and of the impact it had on their thinking. The other historical thread that needs pursuing relates to the development of the architectural promenade: there the notion of a mobile subject reflected a changed perception of the subject and its relationship to the architectural object. Of particular importance will be the conceptual precedent set by how these changes inscribed themselves in Le Corbusier’s work.

In the Portugal of the 1940s and 1950s, two developments lent depth to the feeling of at least one group of architects that the country’s architecture was falling into a set of empty stylistic patterns. The fascist dictatorship of the Estado Novo (as the regime was called) had adopted a narrow range of models by reference to which they were able to promulgate a homogeneous state manner—monumental, even when small; quasi-neoclassical in appearance; modern in functional considerations. Following a familiar fascist pattern, it proffered this architecture as the sole and unique representation of a single and historically homogeneous Portugal. It did not matter that this architecture, drawn from a version of the past adapted to contemporary programmatic demands and the heroic goals of the state’s self-representation, looked little like any of the traditional Portuguese architecture from which it purportedly drew its legitimacy. Just as the representation of the state in the guise of a stern father leading a Portuguese nation as if it were an extended family required the expression of real political differences, so too did the architecture mandate an artificial stylistic homogeneity. The state in a sense held language hostage, and lent an exaggerated urgency to the suspicion of language’s treachery. [The historical thread of my argument here draws largely upon the article by Paulo Varela Gomes, "Quatre Batailles en Faveur d'une Architecture Portuguaise," pp. 30–62]
The second development came from the increase in private and commercial building in the country. Large numbers of citizens working abroad and returning to Portugal to build homes or businesses—a pattern that persists in Portugal today—had encouraged the construction of buildings in many imported architectural styles. Their roots within entirely different urban, climatic, technological, material, and social circumstances, and the contrasting uniformity of many towns and countrysides of Portugal, made these new buildings appear quite bizarre.

Architects, led initially by Keil Amaral and later including Tavora, sought in the traditional vernacular a model of architecture to which they could look as a remedy. They eventually produced a thick survey called Arquitectura Popular em Portugal, in which they documented, region by region, the varieties of vernacular architecture in Portugal. What they sought in the vernacular was a form of building without resort to “style,” or what they called “constants,” by which we can understand formal norms. Although they chart typologies within the body of the book, in the introduction they deny the importance of type. They are afraid that from types a “Portuguese architecture” might be sought and reified into a code, just as the state had done with its models. They flee from the stifling and betraying codifications that are language. They do say that the buildings reflect, although not in types or specific architectural elements, “something of the character of our people” in terms of a tendency to domesticate and turn “humble” certain traits of the baroque. Exactly what that is, which must be some formal characteristic —simplification of contour, for instance—is purposely left unsaid. Instead they point out the “strict correlation” in those buildings “with geographical factors, as well as economic and social conditions.” They are “simply direct expressions, without intrusions nor preoccupations with style to perturb the clear and direct consciousness of these relations.” [Arquitectura Popular em Portugal (Lisbon: Sindicato Nascional dos Arquitectos, 1961). Quotes are from the unnumbered pages of the book's introduction. The translations are my own.]

Paulo Varela Gomes, in his brief but excellent synopsis of Portuguese architecture, has called the thinking reflected in this book a “metaphysic of the relation between work and life.” [Gomes, "Quatre Batailles en Faveur d'une Architecture Portuguaise" p. 42] The vernacular is seen as the unmediated and, shall we say, prelinguistic product of life and its conditions. I would again bring to mind Rosenberg’s idea of “American action painters” whose work did not represent the being of the artist so much as it was an unmediated trace, or record of the artist’s life in action. [See Rosenberg's discussion in Harold Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters" The Tradition of the New (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), p. 27] These buildings are like tools, transparent to their human task. They bear the logic that brought them into being: the task to be performed, the hand that will need to grip them, and indirectly that aspect of the society reflected by the very existence of the need to perform that task to which the tool is dedicated. The sign is not yet broken into the arbitrary relationship between the signifier and the signified.
Whatever degree of truth there may be in the supposition that form has a more natural relationship to “life” in the rural communities and regions from which these architects drew their examples, the central fact of unselfconscious reproduction and incremental modification of traditions is lost and inaccessible to the very self-consciousness that goes in search of it in the vernacular. If the vernacular were merely a model for how to produce buildings in harmony with one’s contemporary circumstances, these architects’ work might have been more like certain traditional strands of modernism. They, like Hannes Meyer, might have tried to eliminate the question of language by focusing exclusively on modern techniques of construction and solutions to contemporary problems. But there was something in the actual formal character of the vernacular that was appealing to them.

The architecture grew in an incremental way and not, as they pointed out, with great concern for formal precepts. Buildings accommodated themselves to the existing conditions of their sites. Buildings attached to walls allowed themselves to be shaped by those walls. Both walls and, to a large extent, buildings allowed themselves to be shaped by the contours of the land. Much of Portugal is hilly or mountainous, and much of the building in towns and countryside exhibits the highly irregular figures that result from this conformity to the landscape. They created an angling, fragmented, mosaic pattern across the countryside. Even in major towns, the streets are rarely straightened, nor is the geometer’s mark to be found in the squares. These too still bear the geometry of original terrain-driven figures. There is then a general absence of an architecture of a priori geometrical form; building maintains the legibility of the antecedent world into which it is built—that is, the rolling forms of the earth—and its slow, incremental pattern of addition and growth are visible; new building does not raze old building. The vernacular has an archeological effect whereby its own history and natural history are inscribed in its form. In this respect it satisfies some of those objectives sought out by its investigators. When Siza begins to practice in the late 1950s and early 1960s, many of these characteristics will have an effect on the strategies he adopts. How his work diverges from this model, however, will intensely reflect the remoteness of the unselfconscious practices of these rural communities.

The other significant historical strand that threads into Siza’s work pertains to the relationship between the development of architectural promenade and the notion of a mobile subject. The historical evolution of architectural promenade, originally connected with landscape architecture, posited a human subject that would no longer contemplate from a single point of view a static and graspable order. It would move through a sequence of landscape environments meant to stimulate constantly varying states of sensations. Watelet, credited with making the first picturesque garden in France in the 1770s, thought (in Robin Middleton’s words) that “the essential enjoyment of a landscape arose from the constantly changing experience enjoyed as one moved through it.” [From Robin Middleton's introduction to Nicolas LeCamus de Mezieres, The Genius of Architecture or the Analogy of that Art with Our Sensations (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1992), pp. 48–49] The focus of the subject’s attention in the garden shifted away from the apprehension of ideal geometries, or the formal relationships that seemed more important in the conceptual schema of architecture, to a focus on the continuous changing passage of sensation. A person involved in the appreciation of his or her own sensations will distinguish between these sensations, corporal and intimate, and the remoteness of an architecture’s abstract autonomous conceptual order—unless of course that order, as the eighteenth-century garden theorists sought for their gardens, is dedicated to the peripatetic subjects’ perceptions.

The transformation in the attitude toward the relationship between subject and object heralded by the promenade’s focus on a sensorial rather than conceptual order is significant with regard to this essay’s original discussion of language: if in the hierarchy of things greater value is placed on an apparently direct appeal to human sensation, certain orders whose presence can be thought without immediate reference to perception—ideal geometrical schema, for example, or the fugitive and intangible persistence of types—will appear more alien despite the fact that they too are apprehended by the human mind. Even though the environment geared toward the satisfaction of a thirst for “sensation” may be as rigorously orchestrated as the driest geometry, an apparently more spontaneous and natural appeal will be made to a self apparently involved in a more spontaneous and natural response. Forms arranged with a mind to this arousal of sensation and related to our “free” movement will seem like a more “natural” and human language, while what we might call conceptual orders will seem more and more obdurately alien—artificial and “other” like the cloak of reified languages that will not conform to the uniqueness of each human being.

Le Corbusier was obviously interested in this wandering person, and the promenade architectural was a central theme of his work. By giving the promenades a representative physical figure and by making this figure distinct from the idealized “order” established by structure (columns and slabs), he was able to construct an architectural metaphor of the disjunction between an idealized order of architecture and the order of the peripatetic subject of sensations. Thus stairs and ramps in his architecture not only facilitate the actual movement of an individual through his buildings, but just as ergonometric furniture suggests the absent body for which it is designed, the twisting ribbon of stairs—on the left as you enter Villa Savoye, or on the right as you enter Villa Stein—suggests the phantom of that promenading subject. The same is true of the ramps at Savoye, at the Mill Owners, and at the Dr. Currutchet house. These components of circulation follow the logic of the “free plan” and are distinct from the structure of the architecture. Thus the “free plan” not only distinguished between those eternal orders the structure would embody against nonstructural infill, but proposed a distinction between an idealized space and order and the incidental aspect of human passage.

Whether we are thinking of the universal space of the columnar grid or the endurance within it of a certain Palladian aspect—the ABABA rhythm of Stein’s structural grid—the percourse through the emblematic Stein house wanders “freely” across the grain. The columnar space is either a modern shell to be inhabited or a ruin through which we amble. We can thus extend the metaphorical scope that the “free plan” allows for: The stairs and ramps incarnate our contrary patterns of movement. But the “free plan” also identifies an enormous amount of what is connected with the particularization of space, the establishment of those hierarchies of dwelling connected with different rooms, windows, and their figurative aspects with the notion of a kind of permanent furniture. The apsidal wall of the Stein dining room is like a piece of furniture, while the bookshelves that are furniture and conceptually impermanent are used to articulate the space of the l’Esprit Nouveau living area. Furniture is what we bring to a building. It reflects not the preordained order of the architecture but the more personal act of our moving in and dwelling. The “free plan” thus suggests that all those freed materials are a kind of furniture within an area distinct from the principal order of the architecture. It is evidently very much part of Le Corbusier’s work. He created a dialectical opposition of an architecture of idealized order indelibly inscribed by the marks of a subject that is an other in the very midst of the architecture that shelters it.

Siza’s sketches reflect his own relationship to that notion. Architectural, urban, and landscape settings are always shown from a point of view that implies the unique moment of perception of the seeing subject. The drawings do not submit to the “proper” order of the architecture; we do not see from the vertex, for instance, of a perspectivally conceived space: the drawings infrequently attempt to construct the objective description of, say, a plan. In the collection of drawings published in 1988 as Travel Sketches [Alvaro Siza Esquissos de Viagem / Travel Sketches (Oporto, Portugal: Documentos de Arquitectura, 1988), series edited by Eduardo Souto Moura et al], scenes are cropped or viewed at odd and casual angles whether they are of classical buildings, spaces with baroque coordinating principles of preferred unbroken axial views, or ordinary street scenes. In a manner similar to that of the hand-held camera and with similar rhetorical effect, they represent views taken in while one casually ambles down a road or sits in a room or cafe. As in a sidelong glance, things are seen distorted, or as the view drops too low, the foreground’s intimate proximity is juxtaposed onto public distance. Here we might think of that comparison made by Panofsky between the “objective” distance and framing of St. Jerome in his study by Antonello da Messina and the intimacy of Durer’s engraving of the same subject, which places the viewer at the very frontier of the room, the foreground rushing up, thereby making one feel on the verge of crossing through the study to St. Jerome himself. [Erwin Panofsky, Perspective and Symbolic Form (New York: Zone Books, 1991), translated by Christopher S. Wood. pp. 174–175]

Siza’s sketches make us think of the changing views taken in during a stroll. Each sketch stands emblematically for one in a series of succeeding views, implying the uninterrupted stream of our perception as we move through the space of city and country. Possibly by association with the techniques of photography and film and their connection with immediacy and unmediated (nonconceptual) recording, there is the feeling of an “eyewitness” account—of being there.

Architecture is the background to life lived. As in Le Corbusier’s example, it retains the marks of our human use of it. Landscapes, rooms, and streets are filled with voluble human activity—people promenading, talking, buying and selling. Other scenes retain the clues of someone’s recent passage: rumpled clothing sits on a chair, laundry is left hanging to dry. Inanimate things retain their obdurate separateness but are criss-crossed and marked by human activity. Buildings and landscapes thus appear both remote and enmeshed in the resulting tangle.

These drawings create the peculiar sense that we hover just before the drawn scene. They suggest the physical presence of the voyeur at the very site of the sketch. In literal terms, in some drawings Siza allows his own feet and hands—hands caught in the act of sketching the drawing we are now looking at—to enter into the drawing’s frame.

Architecture thought of as the consequence of the relationship between work and life, and the reconceptualization of the subject according to notions of sensation and the promenade—these are the two fields of thought through which I would like to examine some projects of Siza’s. Although the chosen group of works cannot exemplify the full range or complexity of his entire opus, it does touch on persistent and central themes.

One of the reasons the vernacular was able to represent to Tavora and his colleagues their notion of a natural language had to do with its historicity. As an accretive process that maintained the evidence of the historical circumstances of its making—the topographical conditions to which it responded, and the accumulated agglomerations of an architecture continually added upon without erasure of preceding layers—it represented an architecture revealing the process of its own becoming. Maybe it did not so much demonstrate the naturalness—whatever that might mean—of its forms in relation to life itself; however, its archeological qualities suggested the historical record of life’s needs. Such effects depended on the passage of real history. But there is a manner through which Siza’s architecture produces an analogy, or more properly, a representation of this process, although producing an effect quite different from the original. As a representation, it is not the thing referred to any more than a painting of a landscape is a landscape. The very self-consciousness of the metaphorical construction of this historicity also leads to certain complications. There is a nagging self-consciousness—legible in the architecture—that suggests that the archeological metaphor also reveals the loss of the very continuity or natural historical process that it seeks to represent. The act is estranged from the very foundations that set it in motion.

One of Siza’s early projects is the beach-side public pools in Leca da Palmeira (1961–66). One portion of it is a series of intermittent parallel concrete walls and slightly sloped roof slabs running in parallel—some at a slight angle—and backing onto the face of a concrete boardwalk. [...] This architecture is intimately calibrated to its site; the pools hold water only through the collaboration of existing rock formations and the newly cast concrete walls. The group of parallel walls at the back of the site are like a delaminated extension of the boardwalk, its edge echoing in layers into the territory of the beach. And concrete is made from sand. Nevertheless, there is something alien about this architecture on the beach. The hard-edged forms of the concrete planes—straight or, in one small instance, smoothly and geometrically curved—do not enter into endless negotiations with the particulars of the terrain. Those portions of the project that enter into the territory or rocks stop and start as dictated by the natural formations, but they do not become distorted in an attempt to accommodate themselves. Walls, platforms, and roofs do not fuse with the landscape, but form a kind of interrupted tracery over it, a kind of drafted graffiti. And instead of a literal historical accumulation of artifacts deposited over time, they offer something more akin to the primal markings of a draughtsman over the territory. They seem more like the emblems of drawing than of building.

Yet this drawing is no simple matter either: The syntax of slipping planes and spatial porousness has something of that original spatial generality, or placelessness as it has been called, that was a quality of the de Stijl vocabulary; it lurks in the pattern language of this project. Like the gridded canvases of Mondrian or the brick country house of Mies, the spatial order—because there is nothing finite about it, no closed figure—suggests the possibility of the pattern’s extension: beyond the frame in Mondrian’s case, or as a latent and hidden order in the continuum of space with Mies’s house. In the Leca project, the tendency to understand the language in relation to this more abstract extension makes the project feel that it lays there with a certain indifference between the new layer and the existing material of the site. We could imagine a series of traces, dashes, and hovering planes proliferating in collage fashion along the beach and beyond. And here lies the crux of one form of equivocation in the project. The particular arrangement of forms is particular to place, but hints at an abstracted indifference. The porous spatial paradigm of the syntax allows the site to visibly pass through it. Contrast this fact with the affect of an intact closed spatial figure or completed type where the nature of its autonomy would tend to close out the site, making the interaction and layering less continuous as the figure stated its formal independence. Here the formal syntax is everywhere autonomous, everywhere infiltrated by the site.
The constant contact between the space of the architecture and the space of the natural site binds them in an archeological fashion of layers, at the same time that the layer of nature is an alien intrusion. It is colonized without submitting to human reformulation, and thus suggests an archeology or historicity where the past—that is, the existing site or its representation—remains alien to us. The proposition is for an archeological intimacy that will not admit a naturalness of relation to the past.
The project suggests an architecture that, like graffiti, is drawn on the site. In this sense, the layers of archeology have to do with the act of conception and design settling upon the material of the existing. But as with Le Corbusier, we are also given little emblematic traces of our own peripatetic passage through the site. The ramps and the stairs are like those set into the background of the columnar grid’s spatial ideality. Here similar ciphers now have as their alien background a real site. The conceptuality of the architecture’s syntax, conceived of as intimately bound and alien to site, is echoed by the littered trail of ciphers that put our phantom presence amid a world of rocks that we can touch but cannot change.

[...] In other projects of this period the de Stijl character of the syntax gives way to interlocking groups of incomplete figures. This is the case in such works as the Boa Nova tea house (1958–63), the Alves Costa house (1964), the Alves Santo house (1966–69), and the Rocha Riberio house (1960–62). In each of these projects a certain more “architectural” character is proposed for the project: the projects adopt a somewhat more traditional vocabulary, using pitched roofs of ceramic tile; also the more traditional notion of rooms and spaces as closed volumetric figures is suggested. Yet in each case these figures are stated in abbreviated form: they are open “L’s” as in Boa Nova, or as in other houses a variety of fragmented “L’s,” unequal-legged three-sided rectangles, or other more difficult-to-name fragments, as well as simple straight wall segments, attached to nothing. The open figures nestle within each other and overlap.

In one respect the effect of these broken figures is not all that different from the open matrix of sliding planes. Space—whether conceived of as that universal spatial continuum of modernity, or the actual but open space of a palpable portion of the world (a site)—flows through these fragments. The projects propose a sort of Trojan horse of conventional architecture whose syntax, upon inspection, dissolves into a series of fragments. Space, or site, passes through them just as it does through the walls of the pool project. [...]

As with the pool project for Leca, the syntax of the Costa house is spatially porous. The conceptual transparency to the field of the site, the conceptual presence of that field in the midst of the very figures enclosing the dwelling space of the house, presents to us the house as intervention “layered” into the site, an open sketch on the site—and thus the persistence in these projects of the archeological metaphor.

The figurative expectations that the fragments set up—the expectation of closure that might have been absent in the more apparently modern and de Stijl syntax of the pool—in some respects amplifies the peculiarity of a conceptual intrusion of the site into the house, even in the absence of great rocks.

The percourse into the house adds another peculiarity. With the apparent conventionality of the ceramic tiled roofs and the bounding of figures, the expectation that one might move through the building in a more conventional pattern also grows. Yet instead of, for instance, passage into a bounded room through a cut in the wall—a threshold, that is—at the front and back doors a person would, as the space described above did, move between the fragmentary figures as if they were a landscape of ruins. Here we begin to see a theme that will develop with more didactic clarity in the succeeding projects, but the notion of how the subject is placed in contrast to the weight of latent conventions of architectural figures begins to emerge. The split between how human movement and perception is orchestrated in contrast to certain conventionally apparent orders of the architecture begin to create an architectural corollary to the sketches we have described.

From the 1970s Siza’s work begins to exhibit more explicit uses of type. In projects for housing we see a pattern of siedlungen-like town houses (the SAAL housing at Bouca, 1973–1977; Sao Victor, 1974–1977, both in Oporto; and housing in Caxinas, 1970–1972). In several other projects we begin to see the repeated use of U-shaped courtyard schemes (the Pavilhao da Faculdade de Arquitectura, 1984, the Carlos Siza house, 1976–1978, and the Escola Superior de Educacao in Setubal, 1986–1992).

Certainly, the concept of type is tricky and has changed over time. But let us say, for instance, that the “U” that appears many times in Siza’s work is a configuration of form that wakes in us a chain of associations with other like configurations. It tends to be nameable, because it is that very characteristic—that it belongs to a category—that constitutes the being of types. What I have referred to as syntax in the case of the pool does not constitute a nameable configuration. It is more in the nature of a strategy or pattern of form than a nameable entity as a type must be. Thus although Siza was using such syntactical patterns, he was able to avoid a certain aspect of that initial anxiety about preestablished languages. Flexible spatial patterns appear to be more spontaneous and less burdened by history.

Yet because the type has a certain integrity as a conceptual category, it also implies a kind of closed autonomy; its stable and independent conceptual existence is a form of aloofness. And it is here that it becomes susceptible to both the suspicions voiced by Tavora and Siza as well as Pessoa. It is not “style” but it has something of style’s formulaicness. It is not language, but like language it seems public rather than intimate; like words, types seem to exist independent of us. Thus types were held in suspicion by Tavora and his colleagues because they suggested the possibility of a reified formalization of architecture. And even though the vernacular may have been susceptible to a typological survey and analysis, what was held to be appealing in the vernacular were its qualities of flux, its qualities of historicity—its layering of past and present—that seemed a palimpsest of its becoming. We should note that like the language we speak, type’s impersonality is susceptible to that endless reformulation that allows all learned languages to acquire clandestine and utterly unique qualities added by each speaker. The resonance of a word is created by the unique world of each mind, and diction and grammar are shifting sands that reflect the biologically infinite permutation of speakers and history. But types also never lose their fundamental correlation to the historical things by which they steal away from the actual and specific into a realm of remote concepts and categories.

Types would seem to work against one complex and essential aspect of Siza’s archeological metaphor. The manner of layering so far described has suggested a simultaneous intimacy and estrangement between the layers of new project and site. The transparency and conceptual incompletion of the formal language of the project that allowed the “intrusion” of the site’s alienness into its midst is not obviously in the nature of the type. This is so because the type tends to be a closed or at least a finite world, which tends to conceptually close out or reorganize in its own manner what lies outside of it. It may rest archeologically on what precedes it, but it excludes those things through its own internal cohesion.

Siza uses a variety of strategies to “attack” this integrity, enabling him to persist in constructing a relationship between site and intervention (as each project should be called in his work) that binds them without naturalizing their relationship. He also deploys certain strategies that metaphorically present the alienness of the type, as an inherited formal construct, in relation to a subject that cannot see itself reflected in that inherited order of architecture.

The Pavilion for the Faculty of Architecture is a U-shaped building, a species of the three-sided courtyard. It is set at one end of an enclosed garden. [...] Perhaps habitual percourses around the edge of the garden drove the logic of a corner entry, now hidden and far from everything else in the garden. The inherited order of the object is treated with the kind of indifference that we might imagine in reinhabiting a ruin, or building the new city around it, as happens in Rome. New windows and doors are cut into an ancient edifice, new street patterns are laid out with no necessary regard for its original order or hierarchy or organization. It is as if the building were a piece of nature to be colonized. I exaggerate to make my point, because clearly each decision of dimension, shape, and location has been considered. But the cumulative rhetorical effect seems to suggest these purposeful contrasts and superimposed counterorders. The building is in many ways, like the pool at Leca, calibrated to its site, yet that calibration feels more like an exploration of how disparate things may be set together, existing simultaneously yet disturbing one another as little as possible. So here now is the found object of the Pavilion; the grass might as well pass right under it. A promenade wends its way around the garden, momentarily leaving hidden this built visitation to the site, and there, in the intimacy of the garden corner, we enter the building. The entry provokes a local eruption in the fabric of the building and an entirely localized figurative event occurs, as if marking the type with an event of human passage, as the stairs, ramps, or other such materials had occurred against the background of the columnar grid in Villa Stein or Villa Savoye. The type then becomes a kind of ideal background for a human promenade, as occurred in Le Corbusier’s work against the background of the space idealized by the columnar order.

In the Carlos Siza house, the effect of this artifice of apparently aleatory relationships between different layers of order is more radically visible. This project too is a pinched U. Its central axis is marked by the living room’s protruding bay window. Here too entry is made casually from the corner, although in this case one enters into a sort of ambulatory that enfolds the courtyard of the house. In this house the “indifference” of site is more radical. The house sits on a raised base. At a certain point along one edge of the site, the raised plot’s perimeter wall folds sharply back into the house, passing through one leg of the U and conceptually cutting off three of the bedrooms from the rest of the house. [...] Vision is inscribed as another uncoordinated order into the fabric of the building. The indifference of one order’s logic to that of another suggests the independence of each. The rhetorically aleatory nature of their relationships suggests the foreignness of one to the other—that is, they constitute an archeology of architecture, represented by typological formations or as in Leca, with syntactical strategies, site, and the order of the subject. Each is intimately bound to the other, yet alien.
It is possible to trace these themes through many projects. In the Escola Superior de Educacao in Setubal, the three-sided courtyard opens to an undulating landscape that rolls into its arms. Distinct from the University of Virginia example that ought to come to mind, the project does not so much classically frame a landscape beyond its orderly tranquility as much as prompt this very landscape to wash right into its midst. [...] The oddity of the paths to the building, traversing along the rolling grassy landscape from one side, or through an apparently casual closed patio placed at an angle to the long leg of the building, make this building seem to lay unexpectedly upon the ground. Paths unrelated to the logic of the building bring us to the “wrong” part of the building to initiate our entry into it. And the internal pattern of circulation carries on to similar effect. We wander the building as vagabonds about the ruins of Rome.

Our trace and mark appear upon the body of Siza’s buildings in other ways. Physiognomic figures in facade patterns lend a strangely human aspect of gesture to the body of many of Siza’s buildings. In the totemic boxes of the Faculty of Architecture studio buildings (1986–1993), different “characters” are detectable, one with close-set eyes, one glancing west, and one, a Cyclops, looking ahead. The skylights of the eastern-most studio seem like a creature from John Hejduk’s architectural bestiary. Yet all these gestures are not so surprising; they, like the optical cut in the Carlos Siza house, inscribe within the body of the architecture the roving subject’s perceptual experiences. These windows through which we see represent that act of seeing in a rhetorical gesture. Behind, a ramp rises along the face of the classroom and lecture hall building, and the gliding glance that peers out during the ramp’s ascent is cut from the building’s face—the slope of the roof suggests the ramp inside but is steeper, making the cut of the ribbon window, which follows the angle of the ramp, more palpable as a gash in the facade—that is, the cut is not “explained” in relation to the building’s sloped profile.
It bears noting that the gateway pairing at the west-end entrance to the Faculty’s campus is contradicted by the change in section that runs along the axis that they establish. Entrance is made through a flared vestibule stuck into the face of this sectional change, or up a flight of crossing stairs and into the bottom of the ramp’s figure. The markings of path about the building and the anthropomorphisms play similar roles, leaving a trail of marks on the building, suggesting an order of movement and perception overlaid onto the more stable order of forms. The project is set on a steeply inclined bank of the Douro River; the split in section is in fact related to a mosaiclike pattern of platforms into which the embankment is cut. Thus its disruptive role is, again, the superposition of the nonconforming patterns of site and architectural configuration.

One project summarizes particularly well the themes I have tried to highlight in Siza’s work. The competition entry for the Monument to the Victims of the Gestapo is somewhat anomalous in a body of work that on no other occasion contains an explicit component of the past’s classical vocabulary. Here, eccentrically located in the middle of a large round bowl of landscape, stands an inhabitable doric column. Inside, a spiral staircase nearly fills its shaft and runs up to its capital. The site plan shows the column at the intersection of important axes—one running down the center of the street, another running nearly perpendicular to and from the center of an adjacent building’s monumental facade (this latter axis is slightly displaced by the corner of an interceding building). Where the two axes cross stands the column. Yet the column’s location, in spite of this apparent logic derived from the larger order of the site, and following baroque notions of monumental urban arrangement, still stands strangely within the immediate surroundings of the monument. [...]

The buildings analyzed in plan all belong to one or another of two principal site geometries. However, I imagine that the effect of moving through the building is to distance one from the city through a certain disorientation, and to allow for a passage into the bowl-shaped park in which the column stands—stranded. Here this explicit emblem and trophy of a past architecture stands removed from its own “natural” context—once a component within the syntax and body of a classical building and from its possible normative relationship to the city, established by the classically conceived urban axes, and perceptually undone by the bermed bowl in which it stands isolated—in a garden. Under such conditions it is not unlike those nineteenth-century follies that were merely occasions within the more important order established by the narrative-like sequences of experiences in picturesque garden promenades: in those cases the dominant experience of the folly was not the reconstitution of the historical universe from which the folly came, but a more general and emotive nostalgia for a lost world. Follies, like collections in general, signify not the presence of the collected object so much as the absence of the world from which a relic has been saved. What then is the connection between this project and the purpose to which it is dedicated—a memorial to the victims of the Gestapo? The column appears in the city like some found object of a world lost, its withheld relationship to the larger city only making more poignant the absent world of ordered relationships of which it is an emblem.

The following is possible: The column can be viewed as a relic of a classical past—possibly of that classical humanist past whose vision assumed an organic continuity between man and the world, where man remained linked to the world around him by virtue of the analogy he saw between himself and the forms of the world. His own subjectivity was not rootless among the world’s autonomous objects and events, but shared in their order and could thus reform it. He imagined that the image he held of his own developing rationality could infuse the world, and if this rationality produced a humane order, then the world would be humane. Humanism could tame the obdurate alienness of the world by seeing “the human subject… incorporated into the dance of forms filled by the world” and should not be betrayed by this world. The human disaster perpetrated by the Third Reich, driven by an image of history that negated the importance of the individual subject, divides us from such classical humanist hope. The column, once homologous to man and a great emblem of the humanist reciprocity between world and subject, is now only a nostalgic artifact to be collected but incapable of integration within the city that survived the disaster.
It is also possible that the column is full of more frightening associations derived from its historical association with power, and more particularly with the neoclassical affectations of the Third Reich. In this case, we would stumble upon this symbolic structure collected from the wreckage, defanged in its museological park. Both readings (if not many more) are possible, even in one person. As they oscillate, what remains constant is the remoteness of history, its irrecoverability. When the past is conceived of, it is called history, and at that moment under the glass jar of a name it is as remote as is the world from which the items in a collection have been drawn.

The column is a ruin collected from a lost epoch. The pieces of architecture by which we are brought to it, guided in their layout by the geometry of the surrounding urban site, still gather as if merely part of a series of abutted fragments. By passing through them, we happen upon this lone column. The column, sited by an elaboration of the existing site’s order, remains unjoined and alien in the city’s midst. Such might be a parable of the memory of those victims within present-day Berlin.

Siza’s architecture emerged from an epoch that sought to recover from the betrayals of language and the misuse of history. The sense of language’s remoteness, the uncertainty of our own relationship to inherited forms and even to the historical soil on which we build, is codified in an architecture that joins subject, land, and language, without suggesting that there is anything natural about such a grouping.

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Thoughts on Siza by Pedro Vieira de Almeida

Álvaro Siza Vieira is the greatest living Portuguese architect -perhaps the finest the country has ever produced- whose works over the years have proven to be amongst the most coherent and complete of all architectural works this century. This coherence is not based on stylistic repetition: it lies in the progressive evolution of the act of designing and, as such, Siza’s work is immediately recognisable wherever it be found.
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Álvaro Siza Vieira himself says: “What I appreciate and look for most in architecture is clarity and simplism. Simplicity and simplism are known to be opposites, just as unity and diversity are not. Simplicity results from the control of complexity and the contradictions of any programme [...] Complexity and internal contradictions – external, also, when a new structure is confronted with what preceeded and what surrounds it, taking on a not necessarily predictable destiny. For this reason, the more character a building has and the clearer its form, the more flexible its vocation.”

Álvaro Siza Vieira
I am not sure whether the work of Álvaro Siza has ever received the attention it deserves in Portugal. This reticence on the part of national critics is perhaps due to the sheer difficulty of the undertaking, a veritable challenge in itself. It may also be that the fairly sparse ranks of Portuguese critics were and are still not prepared to handle such a task.

My aim here is certainly not to correct these shortcomings, but rather to set down a few thoughts of my own that provide what I consider to be a necessary interpretation of Siza’s work.

First
Having had the opportunity to follow the career of Álvaro Siza Vieira very closely -I recall excursions to see his first works when we were all still at the Beaux Arts- has been a particularly gratifying experience for me (although I must confess that this was perhaps tinged with a certain natural envy) and gratifying for a whole generation of architects. The latter, certainly with more involvement than I, have witnessed the development of an architect whose works over the years have proven to be amongst the most coherent and complete of all architectural works this century.

This point of view should be made clear from the outset so as to avoid any ambiguity regarding what I think and say or may say further on.
This coherence, which I believe is evident, is not based on self-proclamation or stylistic repetition: it lies in the progressive evolution of the act of designing. Siza’s work is thus immediately recognisable, no matter where we find it. For this very reason, it is easy to detect fakes, easy to spot imitations by those who think they understand Siza, copying his gestures, repeating his “way of doing things”.

It should be pointed out that the permanent quality that characterises the work of Siza Vieira cannot be achieved by mere capriciousness of form, however elegant this may be. And if there are architects that can be called elegant, Siza Vieira is one of them. This elegance, however, is not the same type of elegance that characterises a beautiful outfit in a fashion show, but rather the kind of elegance that mathematicians find in a correct mathematical formula. The elegance is inner, not exterior, its seduction lying in the fact that it is truly structural. For this reason it cannot be achieved with simple strokes of intuition, however brilliant these may be, but rather through the lucid exercise of critical intelligence. This needs mentioning since one of the shrewdest ways of removing someone from competition, disquieting affairs that they are, is to proclaim that person’s genius, his quasi enlightenment, thereby putting him on some kind of pedestal. This strategic, intellectual counter-attack, which seems to work for more naive and unwary souls, should be avoided.

Second
I have on various occasions stressed what I consider to be Álvaro Siza’s greatest contribution to Portuguese architecture in general, apart from the obvious quality of his work. Perhaps I am mistaken, but I should like to emphasise once more his ability to re-create history -our history- to revive it, freeing Portuguese architecture from a complex with no critical sense to it which has dragged on for generations. And this was done inevitably -returning to the previous point- in the manner of a cultural conquest, certainly intuitive, yet discursive also.

I am reminded of a phrase by Antonio Sergio that I once quoted in respect of Raúl Lino: “…I beseech my compatriots to rid themselves of this division of humankind into two completely distinct, incompatible, incommunicable, pure classes, to wit: Emotional and Intellectual, Sensitive men, Intelligent men.” Álvaro Siza is a fine example of this: acute sensitivity, acute intelligence.

Third
Álvaro Siza Vieira has frequently been linked to Minimalism, as if he were in fact a Minimalist architect. I do not think so. This strikes me as a rather superficial idea. Siza is not -not even labelling someone, whatever that label may be, has ever posed such a problem- an architect that at the merely formal level of architectural understanding can be defined and labelled… Nevertheless, I suppose that if you have to mention an artistic attitude that does seem to fit him, if the subliminal structure of his work is in keeping with a particular movement, then that is the expressionism that is latent in his work. And I believe that expressionist roots are revealed in all his works, precisely because this expressionism is revealed at a deeper level in the formal structures. More immediately patent in the forms of the Tea House, more elaborate and subterranean in the Setubal College or the Santiago Museum, expressionist underlies his work.

In these last two examples, this attitude defines not so much the concrete forms, the formal forms, but rather the quality of the light and the way in which it is manipulated. Here, Álvaro Siza gets to the bottom of the very arguments that shape architecture. One need merely analyse his projects from this point of view to find the common thread running through them: light that has nothing cold about it, abstract light that is purely rationalist.

I recall many years ago drawing attention to the quality of the light in the Leca swimming pool. Today I would say that the quality and control of light are a constant in his work. The markedly plastic tactile light -not passive light, in the sense that it provides a service (the light that illuminates the “simple volumes” of a Le Corbusier) but light dealt with as an expressive object- remains, perhaps, the very stuff of architecture. And in Siza it is conceived as being rooted in expressionism.

Perhaps the Chiado experience, the contact with windows and the thickness of the walls, will result in a certain hardening of light. By this I do not mean a loss of quality, but rather an alteration to this quality.

Fourth
Another characteristic of Álvaro Siza Vieira’s works is the permanent absence of inflated rhetoric. One of the reasons for this -there are others- is the scale he always introduces, regardless of the size of the project. Without wanting to go into the subject in too much detail, it is interesting to note how there has always been an attempt to incorporate a German influence into Portuguese architecture. It seems to me that the Austrian influence is far greater than the German, and that control of scale is one of the aspects of this influence, on the one hand patent and on the other long-lasting. In Siza’s case (which is just one of the cases in which it is noticeable) the influence is a recollection that has been absorbed in refined style, but it is present nonetheless.

I believe that this precision of scale is contributed to by the subtle understanding of the surroundings, and the recent project for the Faculty of Architecture in Oporto, in which he rejects a large-scale solution, seems to me to be a fine example of this.

Fifth
Unlike a certain consensus that seems to have been established around his work, I find the effective participation of the population in solving their problems to be of only relative importance. Firstly, because I think that this participation is extremely ambiguous, and is in urgent need of re-evaluation. Secondly, because Álvaro Siza Vieira certainly does not need such a social pseudo-crutch to lean on. As far as I’m concerned, this participation is nothing more than -in Siza’s and not only Siza’s case- a pious myth, only aggravated here by the importance that is given it.

It’s worth looking at and briefly commenting on an article by Hans van Dijk, who dedicated part of an essay on the work of Siza to this very topic after gathering together various bits and pieces of information, including numerous interviews with Siza himself. Van Dijk states that Álvaro Siza Vieira believes that participation leads to conflict and that (and here he is not concurring with the above statement) the absence of conflict can only signify insufficient or even non-existent participation.

Accepting for now, then, that participation implies conflict and that the absence of conflict thus denotes the absence of participation, this does not necessarily mean that conflict implies participation. In other words, conflict may be a necessary condition for participation, but is not sufficient on its own.

Van Dijk points out, however, with reference to an occasion on which there was a certain negative reaction from the population, that this was based on “class arrogance, populism, misunderstanding of the context and excessive romanticism and nostalgia for the past.”

Even when the population’s point of view coincided with that of the project, it was “full of contradictions” and their points of reference were based on misrepresentative television pictures.

Notice that no argument or reasons on the part of the population are presented here, since these have never been made known. Throughout Van Dijk’s description, the whole affair seems almost artificially created, with one of the sides getting caught up in personal arguments that have little or no sense to them.

I do not believe in the method of participation. More importantly, I do not believe that the architecture of Álvaro Siza is in need of it. What does count at the critical level, however, is that the preoccupation with this aspect (misleading, as far as I’m concerned) of his work conceals a need to confer a social worth on Siza, as if this were lacking. The work of Álvaro Siza has poetic worth in itself, displays inventiveness, formal reliability, theoretical richness and a prodigious linguistic assurance, with nothing to be gained by attributing marginal validation values to it, which merely bear witness to the mental frameworks we were forced to develop in decades that have thankfully gone by.

Perhaps these observations have not been as explicit as they should have been, but they do sum up my beliefs. I believe that only through a mutual effort, a continual exercise of lucidity, which Siza’s work prepares us for, will we be able to put it into its proper critical perspective.

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I have always had the impression that Alvaro Siza’s architecture sprang from archaeological foundations known to him alone—signs invisible to anyone who has not studied the site in detail through drawings with steady, focused concentration.

Later on, those signs come together because they convey a feeling of growing out of something necessary, of relating, connecting, establishing and constructing, all the while maintaining the tender uncertainty of hypothesis and discovery.
The construction is slow and intense. It is made of the discrete, if not downright secret, signs of an attempt to start anew, based on establishing some creative and apparently simple and explicit signs of an universal design system.

Siza’s work is characterized by just that sense of architecture as a means of listening to the real, in that it hides at least as much as it shows. Siza’s architecture makes one see, and it reveals rather than interprets the truth of the context.

It seems then, that he has very carefully removed parts from the design, which is very clearly and harmoniously drawn, in order to create expectations. All non-essentials have been removed, but even that, in turn, has left its traces, like when pencil strokes are erased and redrawn in a drawing. Sharp corners and sinewy curves are interwoven for an apparently mysterious reason, something that has to do with the very history of the design. Its thoughts, misfortunes and changes are not totally forgotten, but are transformed in the construction of a mental site, of a context just as real as the surrounding physical one.

Alvaro Siza Vieira is clearly considered one of today’s greatest living architects. He is an architect still able to make authentic affirmations with his architecture, still able to surprise a culture as blase as ours by coming on stage from unexpected quarters.

The interest in his architecture shown by younger generations in particular results from the complex mixture of meanings that emanates from his work. His architecture is formed in quiet and seclusion; then there is the slight but ever precise touch of his works, which seem to emerge as clean, precious points among the contemporary urban blight, yet at the same time making one painfully responsible for those problems. In addition to this mixture and the tradition of poverty and the gentle melancholy of Portugal, his native country, there is the affection that his architecture seems to bring to the conditions of the urban periphery.

On the other hand, the micro surgical confidence of his work, the emergence of the extreme eternity of the elementary acts of building, the sense of natural modification of that which exists, a suspended modification does not erase the errors of the existing nor the uncertain course of the project, but solidifies it into a single poetic objective.

Over the years, all of that has made him become more secure in the methods and processes of his craft without eliminating his sense of trepidation, of attempting to have his designs express the margins of an architectural problem, when he checks with his hands and eyes.

The quality of the tensions which he draws up and details is touching (to use a word out of fashion like him) and derives principally, in my opinion, from two themes: attention and uneasiness; the clear certainty which is that the essential is always a little different from the directions chosen, and from possible explanations.

For Siza, even detail is not an incident or a technological exhibition, but a dimension of the accessibility of architecture, a way of verifying by touch the feel, the uniqueness of a thing made for a particular place with contemporary techniques, to come into contact with the everyday things by handling them. His is a technology of detail created from unexpected distances between the parts which introduce a spatial tension between the smallest and most commonplace elements, for their mutual placement, superimposition and interconnectedness.

To speak about Siza’s architecture, however, one must start by admitting that it is indescribable. This is not critical or textual indescribability alone (in fact the latter would certainly be one of the best means for the purpose, perhaps in story-form), but the same inability of photography to communicate the specific sense of his work. This is also because his design includes a unique temporal dimension, resulting not only from the processes required for coming into contact with his structures, but also from his ability to establish a type of autonomous memory of the design, completely present in the final structure, built by the accumulation and purification of successive discoveries which are constituted as data of later structures. Nothing is planned in and of itself, but always in relation to belonging. Above all, for Alvaro Siza, coming from northern Portugal— stony, clear, poor and full of intimacy, where the light of the Atlantic is long and illuminates poverty in an abstract way, reveals all the harshness of surfaces, each change in the road around homes, every scrap, in a grandiose, dry and bittersweet manner.

I believe that Alvaro Siza could be justifiably considered the father of the new architectural minimalism, but a minimalism far from any abstraction or perceptive radicalism, in which the architectural sign is incision and superimposition. A timid, unequivocal, circumscribed assurance seems to characterize the forms of his new minimalism. It is careful concentration, the capacity for detailed observation and characterization. If it appears that the use of elementary structures is most indirect, it is rather a hidden, precise plot from which emerge by cancellation some signs suspended between the memory of the plot’s established order, and a new, stringent logic of external and internal relations which the system renders clearer and more evident, even in their wavering.

The first time I visited Portugal, I had met Alvaro Siza the year before in Barcelona, a little more than twenty-five years ago. Then, the next summer we spent a couple of days together in Oporto and went to see his works, many still in progress: Banco do Oporto in Oliveira and the Vila do Conde, his brother’s house, the pool at the ocean and the Quinta da Conceiçao in Matosinhos, already completed in 1965.

I remember being particularly struck by the small homes in Caxinas, a village thirty kilometers north of Oporto and home to a few hundred fishermen. For the past several years prior to that, these fishermen were renting part of their own homes to people who came to the ocean for the summer from the country’s interior. Then, that modest gesture toward tourism created the spontaneous appearance of some one-or two-story homes, often illegal. The town asked Siza to formulate a plan to regulate development. He began with a study of the features of the old and new existing facilities. It is essentially a work of the imagination, attempting to create a morphological vision from the few signs that poverty has left in the form of buildings: colors, materials, types, dimensions and rhythms.

Then, on that basis, he set up a linear-development plan of two story homes: a small set facing the sea. These homes were planned and built amid many difficulties arising from the designs. One of them calls for a small square to the north, linking the internal street with the sea; another incorporates a cafe already existing on the ground floor; the rest was regulated through a series of building codes which he thought would be followed almost spontaneously.

The extreme poverty of the project is put to good use with pride, taking advantage of any sign available, stretched between surfaces of colored plaster of the utmost simplicity, in a strong Atlantic light, with elementary gestures: putting up a wall, placing a window, opening an empty space in volume, coloring doors, beginning, ending. In an atmosphere that is hardly primitive or folkloric, the resort village at the tip of Europe on the Atlantic seems to make references to many modern European cultures.
The second time we met, resignation seemed a thing of the past. Only five days had gone by after April 28, 1974 (the date of the revolution of the carnations), when, without encountering guards or bailiffs, I entered the office of the new Minister of Public Works, my friend Nuno Portas. Seated in a pompous armchair in that grand office was Alvaro Siza. He started explaining to me the work plan of the SAAL brigades, spontaneous cooperatives of planning and building. The new political opportunity seemed to have transformed his usual patience into great energy. Then, after great hopes came disappointments.

In the meantime, however, Siza became one of the great architects of international fame. The first great acknowledgements came: the invitations to the IBA in Berlin, his win at the Venice competition (later disillusioned, which is common in Italy), his work in Holland, in Portugal at Evora and Lisbon, and in Spain at Barcelona and Malaga, where we worked together. Finally came the award from the European Community in 1986 and then the Pritzker in 1992. We met many times in various places, busily and excitedly discussing trends in architecture. Yet he never gave up his discomfort and pride of being from northern Portugal, born on the edge of Europe.

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For Álvaro Siza Vieira it is natural that a typical case as yours is produced in Portugal, that is a country that traditionally stayed very isolated after to Second World War. There were a lot of restrictions to leave the country. The information was regulated, there was a lot of censorship.

The distance condition was an incentive for the learning and the construction of an Architecture capable to jump out of the scene strictly place and to be more universal.
For Álvaro Siza Vieira universality it is not neutrality, it is not an aspect of the Architectural expression, it is a capacity to create from the roots. Like a tree that opens up.

His sense of universality has more to do with the vocation of the cities, that comes from centuries of intervention, of mysticism, of overlapping and of the mixture of the more opposed influences, but that results unmistakable.
He says that in some occasions a first intuition is crucial for the criative process. He believes that in the first idea there is a strong component of relationship with the past through the memory.

For Álvaro Siza Vieira, the formation, the point of the author’s interior development is crucial to solve the gradual implementation of the knowledge, of developing the rationalization course and communication, that is specific of the project, inside of the production of Architecture. For himself, the spontaneous never falls from the sky, it is one more assemblage of the information and knowledge, conscious or subconscious. Each projectual experience accumulates to form part of the next solution.

Álvaro Siza Vieira likes a lot of Art to explain architectural projects.
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His act is produced by side drawing, what considers mutant of Architecture for an Architect, because maybe, in others it is produced with another way, with an image, with a narration. For himself it is impossible to imagine the first creative act without the support of instruments. This is always loaded of previous experiences, of memory, etc.

Álvaro Siza Vieira considers that the opening in the discussion of a theme is essential. On the opposite the perspective tends to be more subjective and personal and, therefore, limited. For himself the way of work of an architect request a great trust and statement capacity, and at the same time a certain estrangement.

It is Brecht’s attitude regarding the theatrical representation: the estrangement isn’t meant to assume a character, it means to be conscious of represent her.

For himself team work is very important, because in one case only one ends up getting entangled in the project: it is certain that in a certain moment what is being done doesn’t come from what projects it comes from the project. This point is important: he means that the project reached it density. But it also considers that it is a deviation possibility: he also wants to say that the project is not controlled. There are always other ways of introducing verification and control.

He is convinced that a project is not deduced directally of an analysis. For Álvaro Siza Vieira the learning of Architecture goes in one moment by an inferiority complex spicies in relation to the scientific subjects, complex that he/she translates (himself) in a specialization of the practices.

For Álvaro Siza Vieira this fragmentation of the knowledge was institutionalized excessively. When he sees himself exposed the real process of any scientific investigation ,it never meets an incompatible succession of analyses. The human mind doesn’t work lineally, but in a form much more sincrética in curves or Zig Zag.

For himself that non linearity of the thought is that it allows the production of a new information that didn’t exist before, because it is open to possible accidents. He believes that there is a series of prejudices institutionalized through the productive machine, in that the possibility that sometimes appears continues remote.

Certain day he read a text of a composer describing his form of composing, in which he explained: “sit down to the piano, I play the first notes, and stop… I change something and soon I continue, but I should change the first part, because the second one becomes structure (…) ” Álvaro Siza Vieira says that each one of their projects has been following a different course.

For Álvaro Siza Vieira forms and function has a complex and relative relationship, as the one that was analyzed between the place and the universal. They cannot be analyzed in a lineal or inevitable relationship.

It always feels better in an old house that in a new one. It can look for reasons and assume that apart from reasons as the amount of available space, the reasons of this annoyance were the linearity of the identity between the form and function.
Álvaro Siza Vieira says: “Maybe in some stages of my work there is excessive concentration in the plastic values. In subsequent stages, and trying to correct everything this establishing a certain estrangement between my personality and the product”.
Their projectos explore the aesthetics of the unfinished of the fragmented, of the deformed.

His language is more distinguishable by the use of more lines than perfect formes, it interests him the fragmentation as reaction to the complexity of a program, for opposition to the proposal of a self-sufficient system, but this doesn’t reduce his enthusiasm for the ideas and some works classified as disconstrutivists.

Their strategies derive of the conviction that a work never finishes. It doesn’t interest him the imposition of the perfection and of the style, but the construction of a support for the urban life in their transformations.

According to Álvaro Siza Vieira we should not forget that the city is not isolated, in its reality, but also has a memory.

For himself, to find the most important in the balance between the object and the city is one of the works and more important demands, to his judgement, for an architect. Then his obsession for the proportions, that it is for himself, one of the determinant of the importance of each intervention. We have always worked in this conflict among the monotony and belong to a whole.

For Álvaro Siza Vieira the process of transformation of the project is in a certain point out of control; it is as who writes a romance: the characters earn a living and they lead to the evolution.

For himself, the diversity, the imagination depends entirely, integrally, of this sense of the proportions that makes a place have interest.
It interests him the proportion as alternative of the contemporary obsession for the total innovation of the image, the fear of the monotonous.

In the historical centers the houses are practically all the same and nothing seems boring.
The tendency for the personal expression is inevitable, it is the brilliant phase, little it ripens of a project.

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Drawing

Who introduced you to drawing?

In primary school, we learned to draw in a very special way. I remember that all the students, at six years of age or so, were taught to draw such things as a closed box, then an open box.

Every child likes to take a pencil to make a mark. Everybody makes beautiful things when they are three, four, or five years old. Most people lose that spontaneity; I think that always happens. Some are able to win a second spontaneity. In the school, though, we were taught an opposite way to draw: to make geometric things or to make a copy of something, such as flowers. My mother helped us. She was not very good at drawing, but she helped us learn to write or read at home. I think I was a little more able to do those schematic things than my brothers.

… I had an uncle living in the house too; he was not married. He encouraged my ability to make drawings. Almost every day after dinner, which I remember very well, he took me and gave me a paper and a pencil and encouraged me to draw. He taught me to make a horse. He was not very good; he was absolutely unable to design, so he designed a very naive horse.

What was your uncle’s name?
Joaquim. He was also my father-in law. My name, also has Joaquim: Alvaro .. Joaquim. Alvaro is the name of my father. Joaquim is the name of my uncle and father-in-law. … So I began learning to make those drawings.

Catalonia

You began going to Catalonia in 1943.
My father went every year for one month. He rented a car with a driver, a big car, an American car. The family went with mother, my brothers, and sometimes my uncle Joaquim.

… With maps and books we organized the trip. We got information. I think the organizing was much more important than the trip itself! When we were studying things to see in Barcelona, I saw some photos of Gaudí buildings in a small book. They seemed to me to be sculpture.

… When I first I arrived in Barcelona, I went with one of my brothers to see Gaudí. It was evening, and I went with him to see the Sagrada Familia. It was very impressive. Barcelona was rather different than it is today; the atmosphere in the whole of Catalonia and Spain is different. It was night, with nobody in the streets, and we went there. It was dark, and I saw the Sagrada Familia! I was afraid because the atmosphere was so frightening!

…The next day or so, we saw Gaudí’s Casa Milà. I observed that sculpture had exactly the same elements as any house: doors and locks and everything as a normal house. It impressed me very much, how those normal things I knew in my house could be put together to make a different thing. That was the first time I was really was impressed by architecture. I could like my house or the others, but not in a special way, not with an aesthetic point of view.

Boa Nova Tea House Project
[The design for this restaurant] was a competition. You know the story. I was working with Tavora, and at the time to make the competition he made a trip around the world. He told us, the five collaborators, ‘I cannot do it, but you can make it’. The project entry presented the name of Tavora.

…We won the competition. Then we began to do the construction drawings. Tavora declared to us that since he had not made it, we had to make it. At that time it was possible. We worked one year and I was not happy at all because the project was bad. It was in two volumes. This [Tea Room] was elevated and the other [Dining Room] was lower. It was bad, but we had already made the construction drawings and details. One day I went home and I was thinking about this and why I didn’t like the design. I thought, ‘I don’t like it because of the two volumes’. Because already on the Site you have many volumes (gesturing to the rocks surrounding the Tea House) I said to myself that I must get a solution like this: a solution where they are on the same level. The kitchen connects the two volumes. I arrived at the office and my four colleagues and very good friends said, ‘you are crazy, this project is finished! We cannot do this!’. So we went to Tavora; Tavora was working with us again by then. They explained, ‘Siza wants to change everything, we don’t want to; the drawings are already finished ..what do you say?’ Tavora looked and said, ‘I say Siza’s is much better.’ These people were very kind because they worked until the project was completed; they did not leave.

Once, after the restaurant opened, a storm came with such force that it broke glass in windows over this beach. The sea entered the Boa Nova in the tearoom and threw all of the furniture against the back wall. The sea then moved around the room in a circular motion and broke out the opposite windows from the inside. When I arrived the next morning, the tables I designed were in the sea! The workmen fished the tables out and made them like new. The chairs in the restaurant today are the very same ones as then. The motors for the windows that lower into the floor work even better than they had before. What’s astonishing is that the men restored everything!

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Alvaro Siza Vieira

I first saw a chair by Alvaro Siza some twenty years ago in an unfinished rough plastered music room that formed part of a luxury penthouse in Povoa do Varzim. It was, as the architect is fond of saying, “a chair that looked like a chair”. It was in fact a simple skeleton of dressed wood from which chairs have been made since time immemorial. The only unusual feature was its back, an inverted “U” of stripped-down timber. It was surprisingly light, all but insubstantial, with a hard wooden seat. I assume in retrospect that it was the prototype for the model 2 chair that is now being produced in upholstered versions with leather seats, framed in oak or sycamore. In my memory the chair stands in the space like a piece of flotsam beside a splayed column, a relic from another time; solitary, coincidental, an object trouve’ even. One felt that, far from being designed by the architect, it had merely been found on the building site and left there as a gift to the future client, along with the fragment of a broken mirror, dating from the same time, that propped up by a piece of wire, was equally provisional. What more does the solitary need in the lonely hours of the morning? One is shown to one’s room and there is nothing in it, except a bed, a chair, and a mirror. One deposits one’s bag and sits on the chair and shortly, after a cigarette, one begins to draw.

All of Siza’s furniture designs and objects seem like set pieces for a mythic narrative that miraculously rises from the pages of his cadernos to occupy an uncertain portion of space and time, somewhere between the real and the sur-real. Thus many of Siza’s pieces partake of an everyday timeless world, long before the avant-garde, where every piece of furniture was as phenomenal as the next, where little served to separate the timeless antique from the latest bespoke piece assembled in the workshops of the street. Thus at times his pieces seem to have been quite literally found, as in his folding wooden chairs. At other times they possess and odd dream-like quality, abstracted from the pages of a sketchbook, they seem to enter the world at a scale that is paradoxically smaller and thinner than things usually are. Somehow they are both there and not there; a piece of “calligraphy”, as it were, realized in three dimensions. This last accounts perhaps for the protracted manner in which Siza’s objects often assume their final form, for the architect is in the habit of designing them through the process of meditating endlessly on a single theme, as in the sketches that move step by step towards the cutlery that now bears the name of Prata, or alternatively the interchanging ensemble of tables, chairs and sofas as they were imagined forty years ago while furnishing the Boa Nova restaurant.

Among Siza’s works one may surely find an occasional testament to “the tradition of the new” as in Gavetas Dresser of 1985 which clearly pays a passing homage to the work of Eileen Gray or in the glassware which, “born of the laboratory”, openly acknowledges that it has been cast and blown from the technology of our time. It is here and in his light fittings that Siza comes most decisively into his elegant, oneiric own. I am thinking of the Havana cast glass ashtrays and the jars and bottles dating from the mid-90s and, last but not least, of the Espelho Alvaro of 1975 and the Candeiro Fil of 1990. Bolts, coat hooks and outmoded car door handles, steel rods and bent wire, a naked light bulb and piece of flex running free, these are the figures of Siza’s pen as it flashes across the page, alternating between the generic and the calligraphic. Here the passage between the sketch and the thing is reduced virtually to nothing. It is merely a mater of choosing the material and the finish. Where these linear configurations are turned into light fittings with the aid of steel plates, crystal shades and bent metal reflectors, they recall, however unwittingly, some of the more ephemeral ironic tropes of twentieth century art. Looking at them one cannot help being reminded of Paul Klee’s Twittering Machine or Alexander Calder’s circus performers or even more generically of Saul Steinberg’s melancholic caricatures.

These are the dramatis personae of his work, the emaciated homunculus and the mutilated angel that not only occupy the spaces of his buildings before they are built but also, once they are transposed, are used to furnish them.

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Siza was born in the town of Matosinhos, near Oporto, Portugal, in 1933. He studied architecture at the Escola de Belas Artes in Oporto from 1949 to 1955, and his first design was built in 1954. From 1955 to 1958, he worked with architect Fernando Tavora. Through the 1950s, Siza developed several projects in Matosinhos, including private houses, a Parochial Center, a Tourist Office, and a low-cost housing project as well as the acclaimed Boa Nova restaurant (1958-63; renovated 1992) and a public swimming pool in Leca da Palmeira (1958-65). These early projects indicated Siza’s characteristic ability to integrate his designs with the distinct qualities of their environments.

“Embracing the Rhythm of the Air”

Siza’s work, though linked to Minimalism, is considered rooted in Expressionism. These roots can be seen in the formal structures of his designs, which, according to Oriol Bohigas, are “always based on unity of space and volume” and possess “an absolute coherence of function and form.” These qualities are already apparent in the Boa Nova project, chosen in a competition sponsored by the Matosinhos City Council in 1958. The building’s dramatic site on a rocky coastline is integral to Siza’s spectacular design. The completed work, which was restored in 1992, inspired the poem “Alvaro Siza’s Restaurant in Boa Nova” by Eugenio de Andrade: “The musical order of the space, / the manifest truth of stone, / the concrete beauty/of the ground ascends the last few steps, / the contained/and continuous and serene line/embracing the rhythm of the air, / the white architecture/stripped/bare to its bones/where the sea came in.”

In 1966, Siza joined the faculty at the School of Architecture in Oporto (ESBAP), and in 1976 he was appointed Assistant Professor of Construction. Through the 1960s and early 1970s, he continued to design private houses as well as commercial buildings near Oporto. His second swimming pool for Leca da Palmeira displays his brilliant use of space. The design uses a natural rock formation to complement the man-made sides of a large pool placed as if carved out of the sand and rock of the coastline. A smaller children’s pool, changing building, and cafe are also included, and the building is set below the level of the access road to provide an uninterrupted view of the ocean. José Paulo dos Santos has noted in his Alvaro Siza: Works & Projects 1954-1992 that the design contains formal references to Finnish architect Alvar Aalto and to neoplasticist architecture.

Public Housing and Urban Design

Since the mid-1970s, Siza has been involved in numerous designs for public housing. At that time, overcrowding and lack of sanitary facilities plagued many old sections of Oporto, and after Portugal’s revolution against dictator Salazar in 1974, the political group SAAL (servicio de apoio ambulatorio local) responded to urban problems by planning designs to remedy slum conditions. In 1974, Siza worked on renovations for the Bouca quarter that would both resolve the problems that had been characteristic of the antiquated buildings and also fit within the historical context of the site. He used a vertebral wall to screen the project from adjacent railroad tracks. Perpendicular to this wall were four linear terraces of double maisonettes, forming long courtyards reminiscent of the type of neighborhood the new project replaced.

Siza worked with SAAL again in a design for the rehabilitation of the Sao Victor district of Oporto, then embarked on the enormous subsidized housing project in Quinta de Malagueira, Evora, in 1977. This design included 1, 200 housing units as well as institutional and commercial facilities, with a raised service duct, similar to the Renaissance aqueduct that had fed the old city, supplying utilities. “Without grand polemic, ” wrote dos Santos, “the scheme touches on the attitudes and formal achievements of European Modernist settlements but rejects their isolation from their contexts. The absorption of the cultural aspirations of different social classes, the pressures placed on the public space by the car, and the ambivalent requirements for communal identity are convincingly resolved in this scheme.”

Forming a Whole with Ruins

Siza’s interest in urban design soon brought him to projects outside of Portugal. In the late 1970s he worked on an urban renewal design in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin, and in 1984 he won first prize in the International Building Exhibition (IBA) for the rehabilitation of an entire block in the same district. The project (Schlesisches Tor) was to have maintained the block’s mix of residential and commercial space, but, because of financial considerations, the developer made several changes in the design. The finished project, though, does retain the curved, wave-like facade of the corner building. Doug Clelland commented in Architectural Review that the scheme knits together the existing fabric of the site well, but “lacks the presence and assurance of the decayed nineteenth century block across the street.” Indeed, Siza himself has remarked that “The problem is to form a whole with ruins.” This attention to the past, according to Kenneth Frampton in Design Quarterly, is a quality that distinguishes Siza’s approach from that of many contemporaries. He emphasized that in all of Siza’s collective housing projects there is the “potential for establishing a critical interaction between the new and the ruined.”

Among several other public housing projects are Siza’s design for the Guidecca district of Venice, which was first in the 1985 international competition for controlled-cost subsidized housing in the Campo di Marte, and his design for 106 low-cost units in The Hague. The Netherlands project, noted dos Santos, refers to the brick tradition of such architects as Michel de Klerk and J. J. P. Oud, but also shows the influence of Mendelsohn.

During the 1980s, Siza expanded his international repertoire when he was invited to enter several international competitions, including the Expo 92 in Seville in 1986; Un Progretto per Siena, Italy, in 1988; Bibliotheque de France, Paris, 1989-90; and the Helsinki Museum, 1993. He obtained first place in the Schlesisches Tor, Kreuzberg, Berlin in 1980; restoration of Campo di Marte, Venice, in 1985; redevelopment of the Casino and Cafe Winkler, Salzburg, 1986, and La Defensa Cultural Centre, Madrid, 1988-89. During this period, he also worked on several institutional and commercial projects. His Banco Borges & Irmao in Vila do Conde, Portugal, is notable for its vertical identity and its dramatic rotational character, with all the interior floors visually related as in Le Corbusier’s Carthage villa. “JoaÅo de Deus” kindergarten in Penafiel, Portugal, is built on a plinth to respond to challenges of site and to integrate the structure’s various uses.

Wide Range of Concerns

Siza’s range of architectural interests remains especially broad, from residences to churches, schools, shopping centers, libraries, museums, and even, most recently, furniture. His design for the Oporto Faculty of Architecture, a monumental project, is nearing completion. This comprises several buildings placed along the banks of the River Douro in an arrangement that, according to one critic, suggests an allusion to the Acropolis. Another has noted the influence of Austrian and German architecture in this design, pointing out that Siza’s precision of scale is complemented by the architect’s “subtle understanding of the surroundings.” In fact, Siza vigorously opposed a plan to construct a major automobile throughway along the riverbank, arguing that unobstructed river frontage is integral to the Faculty of Architecture’s overall design.

Among Siza’s other unusual projects are a water tower for the University of Aveiro (1988-89), designed as a reinforced concrete slab and parallel cylinder which rise out of a reflecting sheet of water, and the cylindrical meteorological center for the Barcelona Olympic Village (1989-92), built on the beach of the city’s Olympic Port. Critics admired the way in which the design for the meteorological center “has both presence and autonomy with respect to the grand dimensions of the neighbouring volumes and the scale of the Port’s quays and harbor wall.”

Other projects of the late 1980s and early 1990s include La Defensa Cultural Centre, Madrid (1988); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago de Compostela, Spain (1988-93); the Rector’s Office and Law Library for the University of Valencia (1990); the Vitra office furniture factory, Weil-am-Rhein, Germany (1991); and the Contemporary Art Museum, Casa de Serralves, Oporto (1991).

One of Siza’s most important ongoing projects is the reconstruction of Lisbon’s historic Chiado district. This area, the principal civic and commercial space for the neighborhood, was heavily damaged by fire in 1988. Seventeen buildings had to be redesigned based on historic plans. The project was complicated by damage from tunnel excavation under the site, which badly weakened the foundations of several buildings, especially the ancient ruins of the Carmo Convent. Siza has been active in seeking solutions for this damage.

International Renown

In addition to his major design projects, Siza remains deeply committed to teaching. He has participated in numerous conferences and seminars throughout Europe, North and South America, and Japan. He has been a visiting professor at the Ecole Polytechnique of Lausanne, the University of Pennsylvania, the Los Andes School, the University of Bogota, and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design as Kenzo Tange Visiting Professor. He continues to teach at the Oporto School of Architecture.

Siza’s distinguished work has been widely recognized. In 1982, he was awarded the Prize of Architecture from the Portuguese Department of the International Association of Art Critics, and in 1987 he received an award from the Portuguese Architects Association. In 1988, Siza received the Gold Medal for Architecture from the Colegio de Architectos, Madrid, the Gold Medal from the Alvar Aalto Foundation, the Prince of Wales Prize in Urban Design from Harvard University, and the European Architectural Award from the EEC/Mies van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona. In 1992, he was awarded the prestigious Pritzker Prize from the Hyatt Foundation of Chicago, for lifetime achievement. That same year, Siza was also named Doctor Honoris Causa at the University of Valencia. In 1993, he won the National Prize of Architecture from the Portuguese Architects Association and was named Doctor Honoris Causa at the Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne. In 1996, he received the honorary title of Fellow, American Institute of Architects.

In May 1996, a major retrospective of Siza’s work opened in his home town of Matosinhos. “Alvara Siza-Buildings and Projects” included models of many of the architect’s projects since 1980, as well as pieces of his furniture, drawings, sketches, and photographs. Portuguese President Jorge Sampaio attended the exhibit’s opening ceremonies. The show, which was scheduled to travel to Tenerife, Sardinia, Brussels, Brazil, and the United States, was expected to draw more than 150, 000 people.

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Modernist Master’s Deceptively Simple World
[Nicolai Ouroussoff. The New York Times, August 5, 2007]

It’s unlikely that the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza Vieira will ever enjoy the fame of, say, a Rem Koolhaas or a Frank Gehry, architects who have vaulted to international attention by demolishing accepted orthodoxies.

For one thing Mr. Álvaro Siza Vieira rarely builds outside Europe, while his celebrity counterparts shuttle around the globe. He has spent his career quietly working on the fringes of the international architecture scene. He dislikes long plane flights, mostly because of a decades-long smoking habit and recent back problems. And he still seems most at ease in Porto, Portugal, his native city, where he can often be found sketching in a local cafe with a pack of cigarettes within easy reach.

Yet over the last five decades Mr. Álvaro Siza Vieira, now 74, has steadily assembled a body of work that ranks him among the greatest architects of his generation, and his creative voice has never seemed more relevant than now. His reputation is likely to receive a boost from his museum here for the Iberê Camargo Foundation, his most sculptural work to date. Its curvaceous bleached white exterior, nestled against a lush Brazilian hillside, has a vibrant sensuality that contrasts with the corporate sterility of so many museums today.

Yet to understand Mr. Álvaro Siza Vieira’s thinking fully, you must travel back to his earlier buildings. Set mostly within a few hours drive of Porto, an aging industrial hub in northern Portugal, they include a range of relatively modest projects, from public housing to churches to private houses, that tap into local traditions and the wider arc of Modernist history. The best of them are striking for a rare spirit of introspection. Their crisp forms and precise lines are contemporary yet atavistic in spirit. The surfaces retain the memory of the laborer’s hands; the walls exude a sense of gravity.

His apparent reluctance to stray too far away from home is not simply a question of temperament. It is rooted in deeply felt beliefs about architecture’s cultural role. In a profession that remains stubbornly divided between nostalgia for a saccharine nonexistent past and a blind faith in the new global economy, he neither rejects history nor ignores contemporary truths. Instead, his architecture encapsulates a society in a fragile state of evolution, one in which the threads that bind us need to be carefully preserved.

A pensive, heavyset man whose face is partly masked behind a trim beard and wire-frame glasses, Mr. Siza has the air of an Old World intellectual. Among architects his reputation began to flourish in the late 1970s and early ’80s, as Portugal and Spain were emerging from decades of isolation imposed by the rightist dictatorships of Salazar and Franco. By the mid-’80s, he had emerged as an important creative voice in Europe’s architectural milieu, with commissions that included a low-income housing complex in Berlin and an apartment and shopping complex in The Hague. In 1987 the dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, the Spanish architect José Rafael Moneo, organized the first show of Mr. Siza’s work in the United States. And he received broad attention when he captured the 1992 Pritzker Prize, his profession’s highest honor.

Mr. Siza’s projects are notable for a delicate weave of allusions to specific regions and cultural figures. In the 1950s and ’60s he worked closely with the Portuguese Modernist Fernando Távora, who instilled in him both a strong respect for the traditions of Portuguese architecture and an understanding that no creative work has real meaning unless it is anchored in the present.
“Távora was a very cultivated man,” Mr. Siza told me over dinner in Porto Alegre. “He was very interested in the traditions of Portugal. But he was interested in the continuity of that tradition, of how it could be the basis for a modern transformation not in any one architectural style. This was very important for me.”

Among Mr. Siza’s earliest works was a mesmerizing public pool complex he created in the 1960s for Leca da Palmeira, a fishing town and summer resort north of Porto. Built on a rocky site on the edge of the Atlantic, the project is hidden below an existing seawall, and is virtually invisible from the city’s peaceful seaside promenade. To reach it you descend a narrow stairway and then pass through a series of open-air changing rooms with concrete walls before emerging on the shore. The pools themselves are nothing but low, gently curved concrete barriers between the rocks, their languid forms trapping the seawater as it laps over them to create big natural swimming areas.

The rough concrete walls fit so naturally into the context of the sea wall, the rocks and the ocean that they feel as though they’ve been there for centuries. Yet by drawing the procession through the site, Mr. Siza is also able to build a sense of suspense that is only released once you finally immerse yourself on the water.

He builds on these ideas in later projects, creating clean geometric shapes that seem to have been distorted in order to fit them into their surroundings. One of his most mesmerizing buildings is a small two-story structure designed for the University of Porto’s architecture faculty that frames three sides of a small triangular courtyard. One edge of the building follows the line of an existing stone wall; another orients the viewer toward a long narrow garden on a bluff. The entrance is cut out of a back corner, giving the impression that the building cracked open as Mr. Siza strained to adapt it to the site. It’s as if the design is a kind of hinge, linking past, present and future.

Mr. Siza’s ability to evoke a powerful sense of historical time through his architecture struck me with special force a few years ago when I visited a small church complex he designed for the dusty working-class town of Marco de Canavezes, a short drive east of Porto. The beauty lies in the slow pace at which its meaning unfolds. A tall narrow building in whitewashed concrete on a steeply sloping site, it is anchored to the ground by a beige granite base. Its three sections frame a small, unadorned entrance court.

That simplicity, altogether deceptive, becomes a tool for sensitizing you to your environment. As you move through the church, for example, the smoothly polished stone floor changes to wood, allowing for an intuitive transition from the formality of the entry to the intimacy of the main worship space. Sunlight spills down through big curved scooped openings near the top of the walls in a modest nod to Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp, a masterpiece of high Modernism.

But the resonance of the building does not hit home until you proceed through the entire sequence of chambers that make up the church. A narrow passageway descends from the main worship space to a mortuary chapel. From there you step out into an arcaded courtyard with a solitary tree. Then you can climb back up a stone staircase along the church’s exterior and circle back to the front.

It’s like a measured procession from the world of the living to the world of the dead, and back again, one that only unfolds slowly overtime.

“The big thing for me is the pressure to do everything very quickly,” Mr. Siza said to me recently over drinks. “That is the problem with so much architecture. This speed is impossible. Some people think the computer is so quick, for example. But the computer does not think for you, and the time it takes us to think does not change.”

The Iberê Camargo Foundation is in many ways the ideal project for Mr. Siza. He has deep emotional ties to Brazil. His father, an electrical engineer, was born there. And Mr. Siza has always been enchanted by Brazil’s early embrace of Modernism and its tinge of hedonism.

“My father told many stories about Brazil,” he said. “When I came here the first time 20 years ago, I felt like in Portugal, but with a tropical atmosphere. More free.”

That freedom is evident in the sculptural exuberance of the museum, which is expected to open sometime next year. The building was conceived over a decade ago by a local industrialist to house the work of Iberê Camargo, a Brazilian artist revered locally for his somber figurative paintings and etchings.

As with all of Mr. Siza’s best work, the museum’s forms forge a closely calibrated architectural narrative, regulating your pace through the site. Visitors approach the entry on a narrow path set along a series of low, one-story structures that house a print shop, artists’ studios and cafe. Your eye traces the long low line of the roof, which is interrupted by a small sunken court before picking up again, setting up a gentle rhythm that draws you deeper and deeper into the site.

Once you reach the main entry court, you can turn back and catch a diagonal view across the cafe of the town center, with the slender smokestack of a former thermoelectric plant. The view locks the museum back into the cityscape, as if to remind you that art is woven into everyday life.

Most magically, cantilevered passageways curl across the front facade like an enormous hand. When you gaze up in the courtyard, it’s as if the building were embracing you.

The foundation building is still incomplete, and when I arrived, Mr. Siza was still fiddling with details. Scaffolding filled the main atrium; at one point he spent a half-hour or so discussing the position of a light fixture. You could already feel the force of the interior. In a twist on Frank Lloyd Wright’s rotunda at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Mr. Siza located all the galleries around the towering central atrium. Visitors will wind through a sequence of galleries that overlook the atrium on each floor, slipping repeatedly into long fingerlike passageways to reach the next level.

Mr. Siza uses light to heighten the contrast between the galleries and the dark narrow passageways. A thin slot at the top of the atrium wall allows sunlight to wash over its white surface, enlivening the interior. Big windows frame views of the Guaíba River. By contrast the curved passageways have the aura of secret spaces. Only a single small window framing a view of the city punctures each one.

Ultimately the passageways are yet again a way of drawing out the time spent in thought, allowing us to absorb more fully what we have just experienced. In a way they are Mr. Siza’s rejoinder to the ruthless pace of global consumerism.

In that respect the building echoes projects by a sprinkling of architects who are seemingly in revolt against the psychic damage wrought by a relentless barrage of marketing images. Mr. Moneo once designed a cathedral in Los Angeles whose entry sequence was so drawn out that the journey felt like doing penance. Like Mr. Moneo, Mr. Siza seeks to prolong the architectural sequence to its furthest extreme. The question is whether the public will feel at ease in this building. How will the contemporary art lover, accustomed to constant diversions, deal with this level of silence?

“All of us have doubts about our work,” Mr. Siza said one evening after a tour of the site. “I worry I am working in a way that doesn’t conform to our times. So I wonder, should I accept more the times that I live in? But I’m not so sure that this will lead to a good answer to improve the situation of people in the world.”

Whatever his doubts, his vision of an architecture rooted in a historical continuum seems vitally important in a world fractured by political conflict and ethnic hatreds. If an earlier generation of Modernists believed that architecture could play a vital role in spurring us along the road to utopia, we now know that progress is no longer a guarantee. Almost any society, it turns out, can quickly and unexpectedly descend into darkness and savagery.

At the same time the march of global capitalism has made faith in technology, a Modernist dogma, seem less and less attractive. And if the bold and delirious forms churned out by celebrated architects today mirror social upheavals, they can also serve to camouflage the damage.

Mr. Siza’s architecture suggests a gentler, alternate path. It does not promise a better world but reminds us that the threads binding a civilized society can be rewoven. And in an age that rarely bothers to distinguish shallow novelty from true moral engagement, that is an act of courage.

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“Every design,” says Siza, “is a rigorous attempt at capturing a concrete moment of a transitory image in all its nuances. The extent to which this transitory quality is captured comes through in the designs which will be more or less clear: the more precise they are, the more vulnerable.”

While working on a sizable office building design for Porto, Siza discounted any possibility of blending the new building by imitating its surroundings. The area was too important since it was between the historic center of the city and a bridge that has great significance because it was built by Eiffel in 1866.

He explained, “We have gone beyond the stage whereby unity of language was believed to be the universal solution for architectural problems. Recognizing that complexity is the nature of the city, transformational movements take on very different forms.”

Siza, whose full name is Alvaro Joaquim de Meio Siza Vieira, was born on June 25, 1933 in the small coastal town of Matosinhos in the mountainous north of Portugal, a country where it is said that every summit has the Atlantic Ocean as the horizon. Matosinhos is near Porto, an important seaport built on the site of an ancient Roman settlement Portus Cole from which the name Portugal was derived.

Siza studied at the University of Porto School of Architecture from 1949 through 1955, completing his first built work (four houses in Matosinhos) even before ending his studies in 1954, the same year that he first opened his private practice in Porto.
In recent years, he has received Gold Medals and other honors from numerous Foundations and Societies in Europe, including what is considered to be Europe’s highest architectural honor from the Mies van der Rohe Foundation and the European Economic Community. The latter award was for his 1982-86 project, the Borges & Irmao Bank in Vila do Conde, Portugal.

In the United States in 1988, the Harvard University Graduate School of Design recognized Siza for his Malagueira Quarter Housing Project in Evora, Portugal that began in 1977, presenting him with the Prince of Wales Prize.

The government of Evora, in 1977 following the revolution in Portugal, commissioned Siza to plan a housing project in the rural outskirts of the town. It was to be one of several that he would do for SAAL, the national housing association, consisting of 1200 low-cost, single family row house units, some one-story and some two-story units, all with courtyards.
In 1966, Siza began teaching at the University, and in 1976 was made a Professor of Architecture. In addition to his teaching there, he has been a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University; the University of Pennsylvania; Los Andes University of Bogota; and the Ecole Polytechnique of Lausanne.

In addition, he has been a guest lecturer at many universities and conferences throughout the world, from the United States, Colombia and Argentina in the Western Hemisphere to his neighboring Spain, Germany, France, Norway, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria and England in Europe.

Recently completed projects in Portugal include mass housing in Evora, a new High School of Education in Setubal, a new School of Architecture for Porto University, a Modern Art Museum for Porto, the rebuilding of a burned area of Lisbon, a new Library for Aveiro University.

In Berlin, his competition winning entry for an apartment building, Schlesisches Tor, Kreuzberg, was recently completed. He has won numerous other competitions including the renovation of Compo di Marte in Venice, the renewal of the Casino and Cafe Winkler, Salzburg, and the cultural centre of the Ministry of Defense in Madrid, Spain. The Meteorological Centre for the Olympic Village in Barcelona is also nearing completion.

The range of Siza’s work is from swimming pools to mass housing developments, with residences for individuals, banks, office buildings, restaurants, art galleries, shops, virtually every other kind of structure in between.

Quoting from Casabella magazine, July 1986, the correspondent concludes that Siza insists on continuous experimentation. “Precisely for this reason his architecture can communicate to us an extraordinary sense of freedom and freshness; in it one clearly reads the unfolding of an authentic design adventure. In accepting the risks of such adventure, Alvaro Siza has even been able to bring to the surface, in his architecture, what one feared was in danger of extinction: the heroic spirit of modern architecture.”

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