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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.

[View with PicLens]

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.

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

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.

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Av. Dr. Manuel Pereira Soares 10 4630

Marco de Canaveses Portugal

The Church for Marco of Canaveses, is only a part of a religious complex that foresees an auditorium, the catechesis school and the house for the parish priest. The Santa Maria Church in Marco de Canavezes is part of an overall complex that, together with a planned Parish Center, will form a small urban square.It was the parish priest Father Nuno Higino’s personal decision to call on Siza, and to invest himself fully in this very ambitious project.
The proposed plan by Alvaro Siza, with the church playing a central role, will ensure that the other buildings will be in concordance with the pre-existing scale of the neighbourhood. The façade (17.5 x 17.5 square meter ) is in three sections with two projecting towers. The 10 meter high temporary grey steel doors will eventually be replaced by bronze doors. “The visit to the place already chosen had disturbed myself deeply: it was a very difficult place, with great quota differences, lofty to a highway with a lot of traffic. As if it was not enough, that area was marked by buildings of terrible quality.

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The construction of this parochial center is also the construction of a place, in substitution of a scarp very accentuated. The church pronounces in two levels: a superior, of the assembly, and an inferior, of the mortuary chapel. As they show the access courses to the two quotas, they are decisively two spaces with different characteristics. The mortuary chapel is almost the foundation of the own church: it creates a stable quota, it fastens, so that the church can lean on. Besides, with their granite walls and the monastery, it establishes the distance in relation to the highway. This inhabited platform owed therefore to appear as “built nature.” But it is also very important the placement, in face of the main access, of the parochial center and of the parish priest’s residence. These volumes define a great “U” that opposes to a small “u” formed by the two towers, the one of the steeple and the one of the baptistery. It appears, like this, the necessary space for the great vertical volume of the facade. At the same time, it becomes possible a relationship with the constructions of small climbs that surround this acropolis. Like this, the churchyard is demarcated.

The initial reference was a construction that already existed, a residence for the third age, of a correct and ordinated architecture , located in the superior quota of the scarp and with a very significant extension in relation to the highway. Starting from this new level, everything else went pronouncing, resisting the complexity of the existent constructions and allowing the creation of a churchyard finally, open on the beautiful worth of Marco de Canaveses. Let us hope that new constructions don’t come her to lean on the terrible ones that already exist and stay opened, that is essential.

The great door of the church, with its ten meters of height, should exist in relation to this vast view. The entrance is made, usually, through a glass door, under the right tower, while the big door is only open in special circumstances. After the lateral movement of entrance, the perception of a low and long window, on the right side, that allows the view to the exterior. In that instant, if it doesn’t seat the diffuse light that arrives of the high openings in the wall curves and sloping to the, left: They see each other, still and immediately, it is worth it and the constructions in front. The window contradicts the withdrawal atmosphere that are habituated at a church and for this reason it generated controversy. The same with the placement of the statue of the Virgin, that is almost as high as the followers and is not agrees in pedestal. Though surprisingly, a theologian, very dear in Porto eulogized the respect for the actuais beginnings of the liturgy, that accentuate the function of mediation of the Virgin between God and the men and by consequence among men. Is facto the statue of Our Lady has an intermediate position: put in the extremity of the window and submited to a very intense light, it introduces the space of the altar, that who enters doesn’t notice immediately. Three steps elevate the plan of the celebration, that ended with two doors, for which enters clear light, filtered by a high chimney. This disposition dialogues with the light bath on the curve forms of the lateral limits of the apse and on the space of the church in general.

The natural illumination varies with the time, depending on the position of the sun, and it is going from the projection of the drawing of the ray of light to the silence of the aspersion: a great interval, rigorous and tangible. The assembly of all of the elements is, evidently, coherent. Though this order, characterized by some existent contradictions, it was built in a slow and laborious way. There were not pré-defined ideas, given by priori. What is now readable is the result of the decantation of certain reflections of the space, today so difficult, of the church. This difficulty is because of the a series of important alterations in the liturgy: think of the celebration of the mass, that now finds the priest turned to the assembly. Such a change transforms the carácter of the celebration entirely and it annuls the sense of traditional space organization, in their several forms and in its slow and permanent evolution. At the same time, this new condition doesn’t justify the interpretation of the church as auditorium. Almost all of the recent projects doesn’t deepen this aspect properly. It was indispensable, consequently, a reflection of the conditions, we could say functional, of the space of the church. However the discussions with the theologians put in evidence the contradiction that involves the several interpretations today. And so it is an unstable program, still to be solved. Though it was evident the need to create a projection of the celebrant, a communion with the assembly, without, unavoidably, if it created its own distance of any auditorium. For this reason I proposed, for the apse, curvatures no longer concave but convex. It is also in this case not a pré-conceived idea, immediately derived of the variation of the liturgy: it is an intuition, born of a series of demands, among the ones which the need to conserve the relationship among the objects and the movements that are part of the celebration.

In the space around the altar a series of elements that participate in the ritual exist: the pulpit, the own altar, the tabernacle, the chairs of the celebrants and the cross, the ones which slowly took form and they defined the space later, in the respect for the movements, pré-established, of the mass. Like this the church acquired form as a sculpture in negative, in which it went establishing continuity relationships and tension among several parts. The plan of the course that, in the inferior floor, links the exterior to the mortuary chapel is the result of the study of what happens in these spaces. It was decisive, in the reality, the knowledge of the meaning of the funeral in the area of Minho.

When I visited the wonderful crematory cemetery of the Dutch arquitecto Pieter Oud, I had the possibility to attend a funereal cerimony I verified that the atmosphere and the relationship of the people are decisively different from what happens in Portugal.

Here, during the funeral, the family and the close friends are very close to the deceased, while many other people, like neighbors stayed at a certain distance, naturally with smaller pain and emotion. It became necessary a sequence of spaces with different characteristics.

Also for this reason I thought of a monastery, in which the people would smoke, talk or eventually, why not, talk of businesses: it is a way to react to that certain discomfort at the encounter, so direct, with the problem of death. This reacção to the pain is not, for instance, in the funerals in Holland, during which it dominates the total silence. The monastery is followed by a first gallery, quite wide, marked by the entrance door, the wall curves and goes down by the apse. Few meters ahead it open up, to the left, another gallery that has, in the bottom, a vertical window from where you can see the highway again. I don’t know what is the connection between this window and the horizontal window of the superior level, but I have faith that the vertical position of the one that is in bass, in the embasament is owed in search of the necessary sensation of the weight, of the gravity. The course finishes at the mortuary chapel, that communicates with the first gallery thanks to a horizontal window.

The people that are in the interior have, the perception of the ones that enter or leave, exactamente as it happens in the superior level, it finishes like an opening that allows the view of the monastery. One returns then, once again, to the starting point, with the noise of the water of a source. In the yard is imposed with private relief the presence of a stairway, that leads again to the superior level. In this project, the unit is checked by the courses that finish in the starting point, circularly. The final sensation is really of a closed place, well delimited.

It always impressed me the obsessive invitation to the meditation that we feel in most of the churches. In fact the openings are frequently put to such height to doesn’t allow look at the exterior, at the same time that the use of the stained glass windows eliminates the continuity and the transparency. ON the other hand, I think that the recent modifications in the liturgy contrast with this vision of closed and segregated space. When I began to study the program, I quickly understood the enormous reach of this rupture in the secular continuity of the tradition. Though I think that this aspect doesn’t have any parallel one in the real life of the Church, in the relationship between the church and the society. For this reason, and in spite of the necessary adaptations, I tried to preserve the continuity with the tradition. And so, observing the carácter of this church sincerely, it seems evident that its conception is substantially conservative. This intention emerges with clarity of the drawing of the plant that in fact expresses a rigid axialidade.

Contextualy, the verticality of the interior is very strong. In fact, in spite of the ship being ofasquare section, the articulation certain elements, such as the two openings behind the altar, it gives the sence of elevation. Several discussions would come to reinforce this continuity idea with the canonic espaciality . The theologians’ pieces of advice were constant and decisive. And so for instance, the baptistery, initially put beside the altar, was later deviated close to the entrance, so that announced the presence of the assembly. Besides, once of the procession of the celebrants has to travel the longitudinal axis of the church, it became necessary the presence of a door, in the wall it curves.

The ritual of the celebration demands, evidently, certain options in the treatment of the space and in the organization of the courses. On some of the interior walls tile was used. It was necessary a resistant baseboard, that obviated the problems of the cleaning and of the maintenance. In the first moment I had thought wasn’t the best about a covering in wood. But this choice soon I thought, because it would have annulled the verticality of the wall and overcoat because the reflection of the light would have been inadequate.Then I thought then about the tile that, produced artistically, conserves a surface slightly irregular; that allows peculiar reflexes of light, while the committees, that are left empty, manifest a sensitive presence.

The continuity with tow and the unit of the color is cut for that presence and for those reflexes. In a first phase, the tile flanked the whole church; then, the wall curves to arrive at the soil, the solution the problem of contact with the doors, was its limited use. One of the objectives that one could not abdicate consisted exactly in avoiding that the details were so evident that it competed with the structure of the space. I worked intensely in the relationship, encounter and transition of the materials. The tile has the function of solving the problem of the continuity, lessening the existent ruptures. The way to solve the problem of the continuity. Lessening the existent ruptures. The way which these three materials are linked - wood, tile and tow - is very special, and there are probably things, that I cannot describe, that appeared to me by the experience of the space, during the construction. In the chapel baptismal I have intention of drawing - inside the wall of the access - illustrations with about six meters of height, deformed according to the perspective. These characters, that together represent Christ’s baptismo, they are of a decisive importance, in this space exceptional, high and narrow, and they will be stylized in way the one that don’t result excessive. They will have a very strong presence, in a dark blue or in black, in way they emphasize her/it in the white tile. I already finished the drawings, but I didn’t have courage of giving begin to the accomplishment: I still have need of time.

The elements that should be drawn are still many.

The own cross was only put after the inauguration. In a first phase I had thought about a cross in wood, with a work of the outlines not very well defined and with volumes, that suggested Christ’s illustration. Then the drawing passed by many other phases, much more simplified, to define, finally, in a cross in that, in the encounter between vertical and horizontal, in the form of the vertical and in the vibrations of the wood, it is immediately evident the human presence. Now I want to cover it with a sheet of gold. The cross was put in a position sincerely gaged, close to the altar, and with light. The sheet gold will give, then, a larger dematerialization and, not demanding protagonism, will react imprevisivelmente with the space. Returning to the exterior, it is noticed a solid presence of the granite that, in this area, is one of the most important elements in the landscape, in the Nature and in the construction. In this project, the platform in granite appears as necessary counterpoint to the lightness and a great geometric conciseness of the white volume. In some hours of the day the church almost seems it dematerializes: some times it seems to disappear, other times in other occasions, it almost stands out violently. And so it was necessary a base that arrested it to the soil.

I had already been in Turkey, where I had studied the Pré-Columbus constructions, that evidently left the mark in certain volumes so accentuated.

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Via Panorámica
Porto
Portugal

Alvaro Siza 1995

The buildings of the Porto architecture school are set on a terraced site high above the estuary of the Douro River. This area is bordered on three sides by highway exits and by Campo Alegre street, and on the east by the former estate of Quinta da Povoa - the site of the architecture school before its expansion, which houses an earlier project by Siza - the first-year Carlos Ramos Pavilion.

Adjacent to the rusticated stone wall of the estate, the new faculty buildings stretch out along two vertices of a triangular site, enclosing between them a courtyard and central meeting space.

The main building on the northern side, a continuous volume which provides visual and acoustic protection from the road above, contains departmental offices, lecture halls, an auditorium and a library. Across the courtyard on the southern side are four individual studio towers, which are placed several meters apart to allow views to the river, their different heights and facade configurations conforming to variations in the program. These are connected to the main building by a series of corridors below the plaza.

The volumes of the main building and towers converge westward, where a cafe pavilion and outdoor terrace mark the entrance to the site. At the opposite end, the courtyard leads to an elevated grass platform, which in turn climbs up by a series of ramps and stairs to the former estate and garden, giving access through a narrow gate to the Carlos Ramos Pavilion. Set at the apex of the estate, this simple two-story structure is a succinct summary of the courtyard plan - a U-shaped classroom building with its two wings converging at a sharp angle. While its exterior facades are blind, the large pivoting windows facing the interior courtyard allow complete transparency between the classrooms on either side of the building, and views beyond to the garden and river.

The materials used in the interior of the more recent addition include exotic wood for the floors and wainscots, marble in the foyers and stairs, specially-designed furniture for the classrooms, auditorium and library, and skylights which draw natural light into the main spaces.

Thoughts on Siza by Pedro Vieira de Almeida

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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