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Campus Universitário de Santiago
3810-193 Aveiro
Portugal

The library plays a central role in the organisation of the university campus situated on the edge of the city of Aveiro. A free-standing curving wall characterises the western façade and expresses the reinforced concrete structure of the building.

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This baffle admits reflected light while a continuous horizontal cut at the third level assures (for those seated) a visual connection across the sait marshes extending to the horizon.

All electrical and air-conditioning services are integrated into the perimeter shelving system at each floor allowing the ceilings to be left uncluttered and spatially continuous with the vertical voids which traverse the interior spaces. This configuration also permits the spatial continuity of the double curvature of the ceiling at the top floor.

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Galician Museum of Art

Rúa Ramón del Valle Inclán, 15704

Santiago de Compostela
Combining grand gestures with moments of intimacy, Alvaro Siza’s new Media Science building at the university of Santiago de Compostela reinterprets Mediterranean archetypes in an abstract synthesis of space and light.

One of Alvaro Siza’s most notable projects of the mid 1990s, was the Galician Museum of Art in the heart of Santiago de Compostela (AR October 1994). It marked an evolution in scale and programme and demonstrated a growing sensitivity in Siza’s handling of space and light. This most recent building sees him return to Santiago de Compostela, but instead of being locked into the medieval core, it forms part of the city’s university campus, joining a series of buildings in a park-like landscape. Dating from 1501, Santiago de Compostela’s university is one of the oldest in Spain, and this new building, for the Faculty of Media Science, represents the latest modest phase in the institution’s centuries-old evolution.

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The university’s masterplan for the campus was initially based on the notion of a single interconnected megastructure, similar to the Free University of Berlin. But incremental additions, such as new student residences, gradually diluted this concept. When Siza came to the project he respected the existing overall geometry, but designed a detached building that completes and extends the original plan. The main component of the new faculty is a long, linear bar placed on an east-west axis that follows the alignment of the neighbouring Philology Faculty to the west. The bar acts as the fat spine of the building, with various clusters of spaces locked on to it, forming semienclosed patios that connect with the landscape and bring light into the interior. Transforming and reinterpreting an ancient archetype, Siza’s use of patios is by now a familiar device (for instance, the rectorate at Alicante University, AR March 2000). But it also draws on other more recent sources, such as Aalto and Scandinavian Modernism. Siza is fascinated by the way Aalto’s informal courtyards rework a Mediterranean form, so reinvigorating and reinventing it. Set midway along the main bar, the library forms the building’s conceptual and physical centre, thrusting out at right angles like the truncated prow of a ship. Hovering on squat pilotis, its mass is partly eroded so that you can walk underneath it to reach the main entrance on the south side. Like all of Siza’s buildings, the treatment of the exterior is characterized by restraint and impassiveness. Rising from a rusticated base of finely jointed honey-coloured granite, walls are solid and rendered with white stucco, in the Mediterranean tradition. The impervious white skin is ruptured by a handful of horizontal openings some shaded by thin overhangs, giving the elevations a curious beetle-browed effect.

As some critics have observed, Siza’s architecture resembles an ever-growing body of research, in which discoveries are gradually unearthed and elements crystallized. This research takes place across several scales, from the city down to the level of small details. Certain themes recur, such as the idea of a building as a sequence of topographical incidents, linked by ramps and levels. At Santiago de Compostela, this forms a key organizational device. Along the south side, the ground falls away in a shallow slope, with trees at its base. A ceremonial flight of steps and long ramp rise up from the street to converge on the main entrance. In summer, the green slope and steps are colonized by students, as informal extensions of the building.

Inside, the metaphor of building-astopography is restated by a spinal gallery that connects the various volumes. Airy and dignified, the gallery is bathed in a cool north light. A long ramp winds past a row of lecture halls to classrooms and studios at upper level. Circulation becomes a social event, as students throng through the tall gallery space. The row of lecture halls is terminated by a larger auditorium that projects out of the north side, similar in scale and form to the library on the south face. At the east end of the spine, a U-shaped conglomeration of spaces houses film, TV and radio studios served by stores, workshops and classrooms.

The building is essentially nougat of different sized volumes, sensitively reconciled to explore the potential for both grand gesture and human intimacy. The library, for instance, is a heroic double-height space, toplit by angular openings punched into the gently curved roof. Yet the upper level forms an almost domestically-scaled mezzanine for quiet study, poised above the main floor below.

Sequences of compression and expansion, controlled views and varying intensities of light are all subtly modulated and orchestrated to generate a compelling promenade architecturale. Light is reflected off predominantly hard or lustrous surfaces, giving the interior a cool luminosity. Materials such as white stucco, granite, and polished timber are chosen for their simplicity, climatic comfort and general robustness (crucial in a building that will endure heavy daily use). With its stone floor and plain walls, the spinal gallery is like an extension of the exterior, a blurred inside-outside realm. Careful attention is also paid to smaller scale elements, such as furnishings, railings, handles, and plinths, which have a spare, effortless elegance.

In their exploration of light, texture, movement and space, Siza’s buildings touch the senses in many ways. Diverse sources of inspiration are brought together in an abstract, imaginative unity with its own hierarchy and language. Yet Siza’s approach is not simply based on set of recurrent forms or characteristics, but a way of seeing, thinking and feeling about many things: building, climate, history, institutional ideals and patterns of use. Santiago de Compostela continues a fascinating evolution.

Between 1973 and 1977 , Álvaro Siza designed three housing projects that together form a defining period in the architect’s early work. Two of these, Bouça and São Victor were low cost projects designed for the SAAL organization in Porto, the worker’s council that formed to address the severe housing conditions that existed in Portugal after the 1974 revolution.

Both projects were built on difficult inner city sites in the center of Porto to provide adequate housing and prevent the displacement of low-income citizens.

Malagueira, the third project, was designed as a suburban community on the outskirts of Évora, an old Roman town of about 40,000 that was the capital of the Alentejo region, located about 100 miles east of Lisbon. Bouça and São Victor are examples of limited infill building, (40 and 12 units respectively). Malagueira, by comparison, is a large,low-rise, high density complex of about 1200 dwellings built over a period of about 20 years on a 27 hectare site between two existing barrio communities.

All three projects demonstrate a design process for building in dense urban conditions that Siza characterizes as “forming a whole with ruins”. All three are made of similar dwelling types in which an architectural vocabulary of similar, sparse cubic forms is used to develop the geometry and repetitive order typical to most housing designs while at the same time achieving a high degree of architectural variety.

Prior to 1973, Siza was known for a series of small private commissions, including several houses, the Boca Nova restaurant, the Pinto & Sotto Maior bank at Oliveira de Azemis, and a swimming pool at Leça da Palimeira, a small community along the coast north of Porto. These buildings display a developed modernist style and clearly show Siza’s skill interpreting site conditions, his use of primary geometric forms, and the attention given to the selection of basic materials and careful detailing.

Siza’s housing, especially work done for the workers’ Councils that formed after 25 April 1974, was designed under very difficult political and economic conditions in a very contentious participatory process that made it almost impossible for the architect to function as a designer. Certainly the astringent, minimalist results of Bouça and São Victor are a product of this condition but they are also a testament to Siza’s skills using a few basic design strategies and elements to create a powerful collective result. The extreme angst surrounding the construction of Bouça and São Victor that seems to be part of the history of these two housing projects, lasted for many years as these buildings deteriorated over time, culminating with the demolition of São Victor and, happily, the final completion of the original design for Bouça in 2007. It was the experience of these two projects that form precedents and set the stage for Malagueira.

Siza was given the commission for Malagueira because of his experience with Bouça and São Victor. Housing conditions in Portugal were desperate at this time and the Évora City Council wanted to build new housing in the rolling landscape west of the old city along the road to Lisbon. The Évora program was quite different from the Porto work and the idea was to build a completely new satellite community that would eventually be owned by the residents in a cooperative organization. Siza objected to the title “social housing” pointing out that all housing is social but within the framework of a pressing national need for new housing, Malagueira was not thought of as a typical installation of subsidized social housing. Land was expropriated for a new community planned for about 1200 dwellings.

Two existing barrio communities, Santa Maria and Nossa Senhora da Gloria, had grown up along one of the radial roads leading out of the city, creating am east-west axis. A meandering stream running in a general north-south direction on this side of the city, passed between the two villages and this space was the site for the new community. Other traces of the former occupation of this area included the remains of an Arab bath, a water tank, some cork oaks, a school, 2 old windmills, and the old residence of Malagueirinha with an adjacent orange grove. A system of paths had developed over time as people walked to different destinations in this landscape between villages to shop, get water, or make the 35-minute walk to the center of Évora on the hilltop.

The gridiron organization of Santa Maria was the model for the layout of the new quarter forming a new street pattern of smaller fragments of a tartan grid of parallel rows of streets and alleys and back-to-back patio houses. The largest of these groups extends along the north edge of Santa Maria forming a long narrow zone opening to open public spaces along the stream. Other smaller fragments of the grid were attached to the ends of the original barrio, essentially enlarging the perimeter of the village. Still other groups were sited at different angles forming several separate neighborhoods responding to alignments suggested in the landscape. The meandering interstitial spaces between neighborhoods are part of the public open spaces that followed preexisting paths and other features in the landscape. These areas between built-up regular clusters of houses are used for community uses, shopping, parking, recreation, and pedestrian circulation.

A system of raised concrete aqueducts connects the separate residential clusters together and provides the infrastructure for water and electric distribution. Aqueducts were a feature of the Roman and later of the Renaissance era and remains of these are still visible in Évora. This established a precedent for a system of aqueducts to be used to distribute water in the new community. Raised channels made of exposed concrete block that are supported on columns forming a more-or-less continuous loggia structure that connects neighborhoods while servicing each house within the neighborhood clusters. The aqueduct system was justified on the basis of cost, but it also functions as a large-scale planning device that connects neighborhoods and forms public arcades defining entrances to groups of shops and other public facilities. Because it is built to the height of the roof of the second floor and is left as unfinished concrete, it provides visual and formal relief to the relentless, repetitive white walls of the dwellings.

The scale of Malagueira is much larger than the earlier Porto sites, but the basic 2-story dwellings are similar. In Bouça, 2-story maisonettes are combined back-to-back in 4-story, gallery-access building. The rows of dwellings in Malagueira, although they are only 2-stories high, share a similar back-to-back section concept with each facing a street. At São Victor, on a much smaller site, 2-story dwellings were used in an articulated row of individual houses with some defined exterior spaces front and rear.

The dwellings at Malagueira are patio or atrium types with an “ell”-shaped group of rooms on two sides of a small interior patio. There are two similar types, both built on an 8m x 12m plot, one with the courtyard in front and the other with the courtyard at the rear. Both have living, dining and kitchen spaces at the courtyard level with an interior stair leading to bedrooms and terraces above. The two types can be combined in several different ways resulting in different patterns of solid and void. This manipulation of the paired combinations is a key to the rich concatenated rhythm that is achieved with a pallet of only two dwelling types. Wall heights vary from entry gate height, to the second floor height to a vent wall that is perpendicular to the street and extends to the height of the second floor roof. This range of wall heights coupled with the alternating position of the patios and terraces results in a rich three-dimensional composition. The construction follows the topography so the houses step along the street as well as stepping perpendicular to the street. This further adds to the compositional variety. Seen from a distance, the houses seem to be taller than just 2 floors as they step up the contours giving the impression of a much denser, taller, terraced organization. The very limited pallet of doors and window shapes also vary in height with the contours furthering the concatenated organization of walls. The houses are designed to be added on to over time by the occupants so that they can begin as a simple two room house built on one level that can be transformed into a much larger dwelling with several bedrooms, multiple baths, and roof terraces. The incomplete quality of the evolving houses within the walled volume helps break down the strict repetition typical of most low cost housing.

Many comparisons have been made between Siza’s housing and Dutch and German siedlungen of the 1920’s and to some of the work of Adolf Loos. The use of flat roofs, white plaster exterior walls, the sparse application of windows and doors and the absence of decoration are all similar shared features. São Victor could be seen as a version of Oud’s Weissenhof row houses that have been inserted into an almost impossible site. Malagueira might be seen as Weisenhoff units facing the street on each side and backed up to each other in repetitive rows. The parallel rows of apartments with the rounded commercial ends at Bouça have similarities with Kiefhoek although Bouça is a 4-story high, gallery type. Bouça may have similarities to Mart Stam’s slabs, but the layered qualities of the section the use of colored walls on the upper floors, the complex section, upper terraces and the careful fitting of the building to the site are qualities quite different from the zeilenbau typology as used by Stam, and others. Loos’s early houses and his project for 20 terraced houses share many of the cubic, sparse qualities and the solid/void organization of Malagueira, but this unbuilt project was a proposal for a 4-story, point-access terraced slab. Other suggestions have been made that Malagueira was derived from vernacular Portuguese sources and rationalism. Siza, however, felt that his architecture grew from the context and from the economic and technical conditions of the time.

Unlike the Porto work, Malagueira has aged well over the 30 years of its occupation. Bouça has been completed and restored and is the product of a different residential model. Because Malaguiera was sponsored and financed and maintained by the city of Évora, and because the residents were living here under a combination of private and cooperative ownership, and rentals, the buildings have been well maintained, and for the most part, appear pretty much as they did when they were built. Of the 1100 dwellings that had been built by 1977, 60% were cooperatives, 35% rental and 5% privately owned. Financing was arranged so that houses could be owned after 25 years. The co-ops also controlled resale prices to limit speculation and sub-letting was not allowed. These and other rules limiting modifications to the original building contributed to a sense of well-being and a high level of maintenance.

There are some examples of the kind of “vernacularization” that inevitably goes on in a big housing project like this, especially one that is mostly occupant-owned. The painted wainscots and colored trim painted around doors and windows on some houses (an apparent attempt to capture the ambience of vernacular Alentejo building), the application of aftermarket accessories like roll-down shutters, door grilles, air-conditioning units (the sure sign of owner affluence), random electrical wiring, added street lights, retrofitted windows and the arbors and trellises that get built on the roof terraces are all signs of owner occupation but this is limited and have not seriously harmed the overall quality and maintenance of Malagueira. The graffiti that might have been tempting with all these white walls, and which are quite typical of most low-income housing, seem to be entirely missing here.

A more obvious problem with Malalgueira is the development and use of the interstitial spaces. The contrast between the highly structured organization of streets and houses and the more pastoral landscape of the meandering path of the stream is a seductive concept but in its unfinished state tends to read merely as leftover space. Some of the elements that have been built in this landscape, the pond, the open theater, the dam on the street, and the loggia formed in front of the shops by the aqueduct are obvious moves to inhabit the interstitial zone but ones that do not seem quite powerful enough to connect landscape and building. The curse of the suburban housing project has always been that it is so often disconnected from the needs of daily shopping; Malalgueira residents still seem destined to carry grocery bags on long walks along the original paths connecting places in the Alentejo landscape.

Project Quinta da Malagueira
Architect Siza, Álvaro
City Évora
Country Portugal
Address Av. da Malagueira, c. 2 km w. of Évora
Building Type Clustered low-rise
Row house
Number of Dwellings 1200
Date Built 1977-1998
Dwelling Types 2-4 BR courtyard houses
No. Floors 2
Section Type rowhouse
Exterior Finish
Materials plaster, conc., wood windows
Construction Type conc. frame, masonry walls
Ancillary Services parking, commercial, communal open spaces

Siza The Modernist Master

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.

The Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza Vieira was awarded the International Prize for Plastic Arts Foundation 2010 Gabarrón Cristobal, who wanted to distinguish ‘the teachings, the international relevance and poetic inspiration “of his work.

The jury’s award highlights the fact that Siza makes architecture “transparent and respectful of the environment where it fits,” praising its ability to develop a “poetic feeling to every building, by working with space and light.”

Proof of this highlights, is the building of the University of the Basque Country, which will be completed this year, the Meteorological Center of the Olympic Village in Barcelona (1992), the Galician Center for Contemporary Art in Santiago de Compostela (1993), the Rectorate of the University of Alicante (1997) and the Foundation Serralves (1999).

[View with PicLens]

The award, which reaches it´s ninth edition this year, had 31 candidates competing in various countries.

This is the first of nine awards given annually by the foundation that also includes Performing Arts, Science and Research, Sports, Economics, Literature, Thought and Humanities, Restoration and Conservation and Human Path.

In previous years the prize was awarded to names like James Rosenquist (2002), Peter Eisenman (2003), Sir Anthony Caro (2004), Richard Serra (2005), Yoko Ono (2006), Markus Lüpertz (2007), Martín Chirino ( 2008) and Jan Fabre (2009).

More information can be found at the Fundación Cristóbal Gabarrón webiste

An Interview: Álvaro Siza
[Leah Kreger. Boa Nova, March 6, 1999]

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!

1992 Pritzker Laureate

“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.”

The architecture of Alvaro Siza is a joy to the senses and uplifts the spirit. Each line and curve is placed with skill and sureness.
Like the early Modernists, his shapes, molded by light, have a deceptive simplicity about them; they are honest. They solve design problems directly. If shade is needed, an overhanging plane is placed to provide it. If a view is desired, a window is made. Stairs, ramps and walls all appear to be foreordained in a Siza building. That simplicity, upon closer examination however, is revealed as great complexity. There is a subtle mastery underlying what appears to be natural creations. To paraphrase Siza’s own words, his is a response to a problem, a situation in transformation, in which he participates.

If Post Modernism had not claimed the term, and distorted its meaning, Alvaro Siza’s buildings might legitimately have been called by that name. His architecture proceeds directly from Modernist influences that dominated the field from 1920 to 1970.

While Siza himself would reject categorization, his architecture, as an extension of Modernist principles and aesthetic sensibility, is also an architecture of various respects: respect for the traditions of his native Portugal, a country of time worn materials and shapes; respect for context, whether it is an older building or neighborhood such as the Chiada Quarter in Lisbon, or the rocky edge of the ocean in his swimming club in Porto; and finally, respect for the times in which today’s architect practices with all its constraints and challenges.

Siza’s characteristic attention to spatial relationships and appropriateness of form are as germane to a single family residence as they are to a much larger social housing complex or office building. The essence and quality of his work is not effected by scale.
Four decades of patient and innovative form-making by Siza have provided unique and credible architectural statements, while at the same time surprising the profession with its freshness.

Siza is a teacher, not only at the university where he obtained his education, but also as a guest lecturer throughout the world, fanning the intense interest his designs generate, particularly in the younger generation.

Siza maintains that architects invent nothing, rather they transform in response to the problems they encounter. His enrichment of the world’s architectural vocabulary and inventory, over the past four decades, provides ample justification to present him with the 1992 Pritzker Architecture Prize, as well as the good wishes of the jury that he continue his transformations.

Alvaro Siza (born 1933) is considered Portugal’s greatest living architect and possibly the best that country has ever produced. His works are internationally renowned for their coherence, clarity, and what Siza calls simplism - a quality that recognizes the complexity and contradictions of a project without trying to impose artificial control over them.

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.

Kenneth Frampton About Alvaro Siza Vieira

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.