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Alvaro Siza’s world-class sports centre in Barcelona is a model of urban planning.

The new Llobregat Sports Centre in the Barcelona suburb of Cornella is an example of what could be achieved. Designed by Alvaro Siza, the 40,000sq m sports centre is part of a larger sports park development which will include a new stadium for Barcelona’s “other” football club, Espanyol. The site was a flat rectangle of empty land between the dense streets of the post-war suburb to the north and Barcelona’s ring road to the south. Access roads separate it from a school to the west and playing fields to the east.

The building is set back from the built-up urban edge and made up of a distinct group of large interlocking volumes of white concrete which express the primary programmes within: a rectangular box for the 2,500-seat sports hall, an oval drum for the swimming pool and a long bar for the ancillary facilities. From a distance the ridge of hills that keeps Barcelona’s sprawling suburbs pressed against the sea and gives the city much of its topographical character emerge above the buildings. The scarred concrete profile of the sports hall fits effortlessly into the tableau with the line of tree-covered outcrops on the horizon.

Two ramps, each the size of a town square, rise up from the car park and meet at an entrance 4m above the ground. The stilted curves and monolithic materiality of the sports hall disassociate it from other big out-of-town sheds and evoke memories of landforms, while the ramps imply that you have to climb some pre-existing terrain before you can enter the building. These gestures begin to detach you from the reality of the building’s lacklustre surroundings, a process that continues inside to become the main ordering force of the building.

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The detailing is sparse, almost nonexistent. The walls are in-situ concrete cast with not quite square panels of smooth formwork. Siza specified that the finished concrete should not be made good in any way so there are already streaks of staining and a patchwork effect where the concrete has cured differently behind each board.

Moving inside, you enter an amazing space 100m long, L-shaped in section. The scale is intimate and you are suddenly aware of subtle differences between being here or there in the larger volume. The interior is precisely formed around human movement and perception.

The circulation area is stark but beautifully lit by precisely positioned openings. Once away from the entrance there are no views back out except at the far end where you are offered a glimpse of the outdoor pool below. Two skylights cut into the ceiling and fill the southern end with a soft glow, drawing you down towards the swimming pool entrance and introducing an other-worldly element to the architectural promenade. Later, when you head back to the entrance to leave, a high-level window frames a view of the rooftops of Cornella as if to wake you gently and remind you to where you are about to return.

Deep thresholds separate the sports hall and swimming pool from the circulation space. At the swimming pool entrance, instead of just a row of doors, a kind of anti-space has been made with two curving walls, not as a distinct room but as a distortion of the circulation space, as if the space itself has been morphed around. An event such as this looks naive on a plan but the reality of the experience only induces awe at Siza’s masterful judgment of precisely where to introduce light, how much to curve a wall, when to step a ceiling.

The poor swimmers and athletes miss most of this and descend a staircase behind the reception desk to the changing rooms below via a more conventional long corridor. Above the circulation area the exercise rooms are arranged in a line and all are naturally lit by conventional windows, skylights or borrowed light from the circulation space. Their ceilings are sculpted with plasterboard to hide artificial light sources.

Siza’s ubiquitous tool, the dado, appears inside the building, although in a less playful mood than usual, and in grey paint rather than stone. It has a constant level in each space and is the same colour as the floor, as if the room has been filled with paint to a given level and then drained. The level varies slightly between spaces to fine-tune the visual perception of each space.

The sports hall roof is a space-frame, the only expressed structure anywhere in the building. The swimming pool by contrast has a shallow elliptical concrete dome roof with 62 circular rooflights. When the sun shines, spots of sunlight reflect off the water and walls like a glitterball in a 1950s dance hall. A ramp descends around one side of the ellipse for spectators to watch events in the pool.

On the ramp, your eye level is roughly at mid-height in the space so the spots of light on the water mirror the rooflights above, like in Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion where the ceiling height is set so that the eye is at mid-height, setting up a horizontal symmetry that works with the reflective materials to dissolve spatial boundaries. The same idea recurs in several places, in the sports hall where you enter at the top of the seating rake and in the circulation corridor where the ceiling height drops near the pool entrance.

The indoor and outdoor pools are linked in an irregular-shaped plan, like a rubber duck, a similarity I wouldn’t be surprised to learn was intentional. Where they join, glass doors can be dropped down from inside the wall like a portcullis to separate them. The curving edge flows through like a meandering river.

Outside, you discover a hidden oasis of curving forms. The pool’s edges swerve and turn while the water reflects the arching sports hall roof and the clouds overhead.

An arc of wall and roof close the pool area off to the south and provide a crescent of shade from the summer sun. The scale of the arc increases as it sweeps up and round to meet the drum of the indoor pool.

At one end of the canopy, where the cantilevered roof is at its widest, a support has been inserted. Instead of a simple column, a slender cylindrical shaft emerges from a more massive abstract volume just like Le Corbusier’s column in the east porch at Ronchamp, a typical Siza mannerist reinterpretation from the modern architectural library. To point out such an obvious quote is to fall into his trap, deliberately daring you to doubt his ability and simultaneously exhibiting his effortless handling of form, meaning and memory.

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In comparison, the replacement for the MVRDV pavilion is simplicity itself.

A cafe by day and a venue for talks and events at night, it is little more than a grid made from short planks of timber, folded down at the edges to form the walls. Panes of polycarbonate fill in the squares of the grid until it meets the ground on extended “legs”. Anyone with a basic knowledge of woodwork will be able to see immediately how it’s been put together: with mortise and tenon joints. A bolt secures each joint and there’s your pavilion. So while MVRDV set themselves a mountain to climb, this looks like it could have been assembled from a flat-pack - given a thousand years’ worth of Sunday afternoons.

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“A pavilion is usually an isolated building, but with this site we felt we should maintain a relationship with the gallery and the trees, and these things were the start of the idea,” explains Siza. “In front of the house there are two hedges forming half an ellipse. That gave us the suggestion to make a curved surface to complete the ellipse. And as the trees outside were in a position that avoided making a rectangle, we decided to make the four faces curved. The curves are not symmetrical because of the position of these trees, so they adapted to these accidents. Also the roof began suffering accidents. It’s like a vault but it comes down approaching the gallery, like a compliment. Architecture is often developed through such accidents and difficulties. In the end that gives character to the buildings.”

A quick poll of passers-by on the exterior of the pavilion before it had opened produced mixed reactions: many likened it to a dinosaur or an armadillo; some couldn’t wait to get inside; others found it hostile, unremarkable, or even ugly. A group of workmen nearby said they preferred it before they put the polycarbonate panels on it, others that it would look better with plants growing over it.

After more than 50 years in the business, Siza is no stranger to such reactions. Although he is revered by fellow professionals, and won the prestigious Pritzker prize in 1992, he has never been a high-stakes architectural superstar like Norman Foster or Frank Gehry. Rather than turning out flamboyant structures, his buildings can look unremarkable at first glance. But Siza’s mastery lies in subtler qualities such as context, spatial relationships and use of light. He’s generally a less-is-more modernist who favours clean, straight lines, whitewashed walls and almost-blank geometric volumes, but his buildings are usually too sensitive to their users and their surroundings to veer into uptight minimalism.

One of his most celebrated works, for example, is a public swimming pool built in the late 1960s at Leça da Palmeira. It consists of little more than concrete planes and platforms defining a group of tidal pools, but with minimal intervention they create a space that relates to both the natural rock formations and the concrete seawalls of the decidedly un-picturesque Altantic coastline.

From a similar school of thought, the younger Eduardo Souto de Moura worked in Siza’s office during the 1970s before branching off on his own. At least one of his projects is arguably more famous in Britain than any of Siza’s: the Braga Stadium, which hosted football matches during Euro 2004 - it was the one with a sheer granite rock face at one end of the pitch. The two architects have collaborated before, on Portugal’s flagship pavilion at Expo 98 in Lisbon, but that was formal and monumental, in marked contrast to the casual, playful building at the Serpentine.

“We worked at the same table, sometimes both writing in different corners of the same piece of paper,” says Siza. “It’s a work of friendship and amusement. It’s like a holiday, because one of the attractions of this work is that there is no bureaucracy, no need to know about regulations. It was very free.”

The influence of Arup’s Cecil Balmond is there to see in the broken up geometry of the structure, and the fact that the whole thing stands up. On closer inspection, the timber grid appears to be warped out of shape and the lines of the timber elements are staggered zig-zags, as if it the building had been shaken by an earthquake. Despite the basic construction methods, the pavilion is the result of serious computing power and precision engineering. Every piece of wood and every pane of polycarbonate is different.

Had they been allowed inside the pavilion, the sceptics of Kensington Gardens might have been won over by Siza and Souto de Moura’s artistry. In contrast to the exterior, the space inside is unexpectedly grand and yet almost ecclesiastically tranquil. The semi-opaque panels give the ceiling a luminous glow, and the leaves of the surrounding trees are silhouetted on the walls. A solar-powered light in the centre of each roof panel turns on automatically at dusk, but because each panel is differently orientated, the lights come on one by one. And as with Siza’s other works, the pavilion is acutely sensitive to its surroundings. The walls appear to bow outwards in deference to the surrounding trees, and openings at the corners neatly frame young trees and views across the park. The decision to leave the bottom metre or so of the structure open means that visitors sitting at the cafe tables (designed by Siza, of course) will be able to see out across the park.

Siza has yet to visit the site, though. Souto de Moura came and took notes and photos from which they worked out the design. But Siza is not offended that people have likened his structure a giant armadillo. “Actually, I think it is my fault,” he says. “In the beginning when describing it, I said it was like an animal with its feet in the ground. It wasn’t in our minds to make it look like an animal, but in the end we are always confronted with nature and with natural forms. Forms are not only defined by complex mathematics and proportions, we can look around and we have trees and dogs and people. It’s like an alphabet of proportions and relations that we use. I think that’s one of the tasks of the architect: to make things look simple and natural which in fact are complex.”

By Fernando Guerra

Designed in Portugal, engineered in England, fabricated in Germany using innovative Finnish technology, built, with lashings of Anglo-Saxon enterprise, in London and all done in six months without a penny of subsidy: if Tony Blair wants a symbol of the New Europe to mark his presidency of the European Union, he had better claim this year’s Serpentine Pavilion in Kensington Gardens as his own.

If all had gone well, this year would have seen the Serpentine Gallery swallowed up by the radical Dutch practice MVRDV’s mountain. But that proved one leap too far. Cost and, one suspects, such practical issues as fire escapes, intervened, so although technically still a work “in progress”, it was shelved.

Instead, Julia Peyton-Jones, the Serpentine’s director, turned last December to the magisterial 72-year-old Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza and his long-term collaborator Eduardo Souto de Moura to come up with this year’s pavilion.

Siza is one of the grand old men of European architecture, best known for crisp white buildings such as the Museu Serralves in Porto, the church of Sta Maria at Marco de Canavezes, and the wonderful Portuguese Pavilion at the Lisbon Expo of 1998, with its hanging concrete “veil”.

Souto de Moura, who is 53, worked for Siza for five years before setting up on his own, but they still share the same building and occasionally collaborate on projects such as the Lisbon Pavilion.

And there is a third figure to throw into the mix - the engineer Cecil Balmond, deputy chairman of Arup, who worked with Siza and Souto de Moura on the Portuguese Pavilion and has been the éminence grise behind all the Serpentine Pavilions, making sure that these small but complex buildings can actually stand up.

The brief is simple: a pavilion that can be used by the cramped Serpentine Gallery as a café for the summer by day and a place for parties and events by night. But the aim is much more ambitious: to create an instant architectural exhibition as substantial and satisfying as any show within the Serpentine. Architecture is notoriously difficult to turn into an exhibition, so why not call in architects who have never built in London to design a temporary building instead?

The last pavilion, the ageing Niemeyer’s small but monumental structure, was a built retrospective, a summation of key ideas from a career that has lasted more than 70 years. Those expecting something similar from Siza are in for a surprise.

Instead of a highly sophisticated exploration of the ideals of classic white modernism like the Museu Serralves, this year’s pavilion is unprecedented in his work, a billowing lattice-like timber structure, filled in with polycarbonate panels, that resembles nothing so much as a “tortoise”, the instant defence that Roman legionaries created by locking their shields together.

When I met Siza and Souto de Moura at the pavilion, fresh from the airport, it became clear that what had driven the design was the site, particularly the two handsome oak trees that sail over the pavilion, which Siza described as like a sculpture, and which form an anchor for the building.

The parameters were simple: the two trees, the bulk of the Serpentine Gallery and the lawn in-between, which is embraced by curving paths. From this came the idea of a rectangular structure pushed out of shape by the trees - the timber supports almost seem to shy away from the branches - with the wall towards the Serpentine Gallery curving to respect the shape of the lawn.

The first discussion with Cecil Balmond brought up the question of whether the structure should have a refined, almost “high-tech” feel (like all the preceding pavilions) or be something more vernacular. Despite their long-term interest in clean white lines, both Siza and Souto de Moura have always had a fascination with local materials such as timber, masonry and ceramic tiles, so they chose to take the vernacular route. (Siza explained that the result was partly inspired by English half-timbered structures, but with a strongly Japanese touch.)

The structure is entirely constructed out of an innovative, strong laminated timber, Laminated Veneer Lumber, made by Finnforest in Finland, cut from great sheets into small planks outside Munich, stained to match the oak trees and bring out the grain and put together like a giant flatpack in London.

Choosing the cladding was the other key decision. Should this be fabric or a fixed cladding? Siza wanted it to be light but solid, so he chose translucent polycarbonate panels, carefully arranged so that when you stand up your eye is caught by the structure, but when you sit down you can look through the open trellis to the park.

Each of the panels in the roof is penetrated by a ventilation cowl holding a battery-operated, solar-powered light, which illuminates the interior by night and gives it an ethereal glow from outside - all with the added benefit that there is no need for any cabling to spoil the lines.

The result is a chunky, engaging building that is definitely more challenging than any of the other pavilions so far. Instead of the spatial pyrotechnics of Hadid and Libeskind, the thrilling geometry of Ito or the satisfying inevitability of Niemeyer, Siza and Souto de Moura’s pavilion takes time to reveal its qualities. But sit under the restless grid, at chairs and tables designed by Siza, watching the life of the park go by and the subtleties of the building slowly reveal themselves.

Architecture, particularly temporary architecture, should not necessarily be an instant wow. Sometimes it should require us to delve deeper, to think a little harder, and that is what Siza and Souto de Moura make us do.

The Armanda Passos House
Álvaro Siza

The Interiorized House

Amidst horizontal and vertical planes conditioned by the contours of the terrain, memories of Zen gardens and fire signs, the Armanda Passos house has gently risen – the most recent project by Álvaro Siza in Porto.

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Designed to be lived in at all hours of the day, when light seeks out shade, and shade opens itself to the light, the house-atelier, commissioned by painter Armanda Passos from the most international name in Portuguese architecture, allows the complicity naturally created by the architect with his work to transpire at each step. This is the second dwelling designed by Siza in Porto. The first was built in the 1960’s on the Avenida dos Combatentes. Between project and construction, via the city council approval process, three years passed (2002-2005). The project included the demolition of the existing house and the construction of three volumes, interlinked and joined in a way that defines two patio-gardens, interspersed by existing trees. There is even a wide garden between the border wall of the avenue’s pavement and the front of the building. Additional trees were planted. It is claimed that they establish a bridge between East and West. In an interview with Arquitectura & Construção, Álvaro Siza discusses the completed project:

The Armanda Passos house was built for a friend…
Now she is, at the time we did not have such a close friendship. Afterwards we did, because the building of a home is a great story.

How did you face the challenge?
She is sensitive person with a great attachment to the house and I created, in a special way, not only comfort but also the whole aspect of association with the garden, intimacy, quality of light, etc. It is very pleasing for an architect to have a client that has these requirements in terms of quality.

What about the project?
The project assigned to me includes a residential part with a multifunctional living room that can be projected/extended from a stage that can be raised to varying elevations. The residence and the multifunctional living room are interconnected by a transitional space: an atrium. After that there is an atelier with Northern exposure.

The roof of the atelier has two gradients like in old factories and warehouses, which give it a special light….
Exactly. The so-called shade? It has a high, northern light.

In the interior, you experimented a lot with different volumes…
The ground area is small and I wanted to take as much advantage of the garden as possible in order to avoid creating an isolated mass. As there were three functionally well-defined parts to the project, two of which were connected and one which could function independently, I used this to organise the patios. There is a patio between the multifunctional living room and the residence to the west; there is another next to the driveway; and there is a space in front of the multifunctional living room, between it and a transitional wall that stands between the street and the front of the house. So there are three quite differentiated spaces.

The house is slightly lower than its neighbours. Was this intentional?
All of the neighbouring houses have two floors. In this one, the part most visible from the street is only one storey, though it is taller than average. It is intentional because it was possible to connect the three volumes and thus create patios on all three sides. The two-storey volume and the taller volume, because of the shades, are in the back. The fact that there is an open space in front and on the two sides allowed for the planting of trees and the creation of a certain intimacy in the exterior areas of the lot. As the neighbouring houses are two-storey, if this one were as well, it would feel narrow. In this way, a sensation of generous, roomy interior space is possible.

At the same time, the house contains elements characteristic of the 1950’s –such as the brises-soleil- as well as presenting an eastern spirit. There’s an understanding here between East and West…
There is no doubt that in traditional Japanese architecture –as beautiful as it is- there is this concern. An articulation exists that organizes well-defined exterior spaces –the patios- and allows for quite significant communication that at the same time is intimate with the interior. The famous Zen gardens of Osaka are articulate constructions that connect and depart from the geometric spaces where they create marvellous garden compositions. In this case, the way in which the garden is laid out is not related to the Zen gardens, but a feeling of intimacy exists. As the house does not contain too much glass, it benefits from the communication between the interior and exterior in the large windows that frame these exterior spaces.

The brises-soleil repel the light and cast a shadow on the ground like an architectural memory. The gutters also mark the limits of the brises-soleil on the ground.
The brises-soleil are there to provide protection from the sun and the heat and also create a transition between the interior and exterior.

At a certain point, the volumes almost touch at certain angles…
Yes. The bodies of the atelier together with the veranda and the residence’s brise-soleil almost touch. They are three well-defined structures, but are intended to form a whole. Hence the proximity of elements of one structure with another to establish transitional spaces and unify the ensemble.

There are details that are almost indicative of elements. One recalls an outline of the veranda that functions like an arrow pointing out a tree or a detail of the wall. Thus, the architecture itself follows a path…
It follows the treatment of the garden. The areas where the trees and bushes are planted are based on providing solar protection. For example, the west-facing multifunctional living room window has a brise-soleil. First of all, because the brise-soleil protects the window from the south when the sun is high in the sky. When the sun is low, it doesn’t help so much. Other systems have to be used, like the brise-soleil. When the sun sets, even the neighbouring house provides significant protection. Where the sun could enter diagonally and create discomfort during the summer, an evergreen tree was planted. Next to the window sash of the large window on the western side of the multifunctional living room, there is a deciduous tree because in the winter the house is more comfortable with direct sunlight. During the warm season the house is shaded.

Is it a four-season home?
Yes, it is. These are elementary things that both spontaneous and erudite architecture have always used in the mutual relationship between nature and man-made construction.

At the top of the stairs, the light that enters through the skylight signals the steps as if showing the way. It is a repeating gesture…
I don’t really like violent light and curtains are necessary, but I also like it when a house can stand completely open, when there are transparencies. Controlling light is not only done through curtains, but also through brises-soleil which break the intensity of the light and the location and orientation of the windows themselves, the end goal being thermal comfort. Metering light intensity was something that old houses did, particularly those in the south, of Arab tradition. Patios with very intense light, porticos that create a transition to the interior, then more broken light and even shady areas –they are necessary for comfort.

Your houses have this tradition…
I don’t recall having designed an entirely glass house. Not only because of comfort and to not have to resort to mechanical means, but because I think a house needs to contain different environments. Some are more relaxing and serene, others are more extroverted. A house is made up of these variations. It is apparently simple because many things take place inside a home.

In the interior of the atelier, the light from the shades almost give one a sense of looking through the windows of a cathedral with a rising light….
The intention was not to create a religious environment, but, as the house belongs to a painter, special care is needed with the light in order to create good conditions for painting as well as maintenance. Not too long ago, Armanda Passos contacted me, because, although the shades face north, in the summer there is an hour when the sun enters. Not only can it be bothersome, it can damage the paintings, and therefore we are going to install outdoor blinds so that during these few days, the rays are blocked.

The atelier’s windows give the illusion that they can be pulled down. Almost opening the entire sky…
That doesn’t happen in this case. The windows run all the way to the floor, but they have panes that open. The larger parts are sliding doors and in certain cases move as one piece. There is no crossbar. It is an entire piece of glass that runs inside the wall.

In general, the window and door planes are well defined. Some open broadly, others narrowly. As if you were playing with the volumes in a harmonic game…
It’s a game that requires great effort [laughs], but there is a dimension of pleasure in this effort because the possibility of working for someone who asks for and demands quality is not frequent –whether it is a public or private work.

Everything has been geared toward the client…
Yes, she was extremely demanding with regards to the quality of the construction –which is very good. It’s not enough for the architect to demand quality in construction. The person paying for the building who demands quality has a different impact. Often, who’s paying is not so interested in quality. This demand for quality is considered to be the whim of an annoying architect.

Do the lateral walls that separate the house from its neighbours have different heights for security?
Yes. The walls were utilised. On one of the sides the wall was raised and the neighbours did not raise any problems. The other side was not even touched.

What materials were used for the house?
It’s traditional from a materials point of view. The walls and outer shell are reinforced concrete. In my experience, it is very difficult to mix materials. Any minor error during installation can lead to the appearance of cracks. All of the houses I’ve done in reinforced concrete are in excellent shape. Even the one I did in the 1960’s is concrete and it has never had any problems with cracks, moisture, etc. The supporting wall is in reinforced concrete that is duplicated outside with a wall in stuccoed brick. Between the two is a ventilation space containing thermal isolation material. This means the wall is 45cm thick, including inner and outer stucco. The advantages are the isolation. On the exterior, besides the stucco, there is a granite groove to guard against ground moisture. Most of the periphery contains a coarse gravel band with a drain underneath, precisely so moisture does not affect the stucco.

And with regard to the wood used?
All the wood is painted, the interior and exterior frames, except for the flooring, which is of restored old Scots pine, and the stairs. In areas with water, marble was installed. The kitchen was especially designed for the house, although today it is in production at the factory that built it. Countertops are in marble. The rest is lacquered wood.

Are the window frames made of wood?
Yes. The outer part has an aluminium panel that holds the glass in place and also protects the paint. It’s Iroko wood, treated so that it can handle the paint.

What are the roofing materials?
Earth and vegetation. It is a flat roof in waterproofed concrete and immediately on top is a 40cm layer of soil for the grass.

And the roof of the atelier?
It’s covered with zinc.

The shades provide a very large movement to the entire roof…
Yes, they increase slightly from front to back so that it gently conforms with the street. The house almost goes unnoticed. The recessed part contains two floors. The atelier has higher ceilings because Armanda builds large canvases and really needs the space and breathing room. All of this takes place in the back, cut off by the trees. So, it’s not an exhibitionistic house. It’s more interiorized.