·

Alvaro Siza Vieira | ...by himself

conversation · nuances · expression

editor: Félix Arranz

architecture + architects

scalae ebook collection #007, english · collectors edition

ebook June 2016 · papeback April 2017

ISBN-13: 978-1545013441 · ISBN-10: 1545013446

bookID: scalae.net-siza-self-draftENG-20170403-01

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scalae documents, broadcasts, and stimulates debate around, criticism of, and research into architects and other agents involved in the narration, creation, and construction of architectures that provide shelter for people’s lives and aspirations

www.scalae.net

[index]

issue credits “Alvaro Siza Vieira ...by himself”

scalae international ebook collection

collection credits

conversation

nuances

expression

fish

12 referencies

5 works > scalae.net

...a sculptor in love

get involved

acknowledgements

tech

podcast (spanish)

collection catalogue

copyright

[issue credits. 2017]

· issue: Alvaro Siza Vieira ...by himself, draft, ENG v1.0 2017

#007 scalae architecture + architects international ebook collection, April 2017, scalae ed, Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain, Europe)

>>> paperback collectors edition, April 2017, scalae ed, Barcelona, by means of Amazon Createspace.

· editor: Felix Arranz

· associated editor (conversation): Jaume Prat Ortells

· social management: SCALAE editorial & industries board

· english translation: Victoria Patience [martiarenapatience.com]

· photographs: Arquivo Alvaro Siza, Jaume Prat Ortells, Juan Domingo Santos

· drawings: Alvaro Siza Vieira, Arquivo Alvaro Siza

. technical & distribution support: Micky Bou [ysi.net]

. free distribution & subscriptions: archBIB.com and scalae.net

. ebooks@scalae.net

. disponible la versión en español de este ebook en scalae.net, android ios kindle

. disponible la versió en català d'aquest ebook a scalae.net, android ios kindle

[scalae international ebook collection]

The scalae architecture + architects international ebook collection is a European initiative that began in Barcelona. It became a reality through the support and teamwork of a group of experts, institutions, and companies that are committed to internationalizing industries and their work, creating product intelligence for the construction industry, and configuring an architectonic project based on cultural exchange and debate.

The collection is a continuation of scalae’s earlier publications and initiatives: print publications (scalae 0.0; 2003), podcasts (scalae 1.0; 2005), and the scalae.net rss documentaries (scalae 2.0; 2009), complementary undertakings which are all still available online.

Each volume in the collection focuses on a single Catalan, Spanish, European, or international architect, studio, or architectural agent, and the volume is divided into three ebooks. The first book, “...self” (by themselves), begins with a transcription of a conversation – usually available online as a podcast – that covers the principles, processes, and results of the person or studio in question. It also includes a selection of significant graphics or drawings of theirs in an attempt to reflect on the connection between words and signs in their way of creating architecture. The second book, “...from” (questions), includes the subject’s opinions, experience, or critiques of topics and objects they hold dear. The third book, “...about” (regarding...), reflects other people’s opinions, experiences, and critiques of the subject’s creations, techniques, and professional and personal output. The ...self, ...from, and ...about ebooks make up a complete volume. They are published as free, internationally distributed ebooks in English, Spanish, and Catalan in two formats: mobi (Kindle®) and ePub (iBook, iPad, most eReaders like sony®, fnac®, etc.).

In the final stage of this open production process – which includes both the ebooks and the online material – the issues in the collection become available for low-cost, on-demand printing for those wishing to have a paper version and for public reference libraries in Catalonia and the rest of Spain and in international centres for architecture and culture.

The collection is testimony to the efforts of many people – a fractal map of involvement on the part of the editorial board and multiple other agents – whose only motivation is the desire to open up ideas, documentation, and research so as to foster debate. Their work does not rely on sponsorship or conventional advertising but rather on collaboration: companies produce original articles about their work, which constitute an alternative – and direct – form of expression.

[collection credits. 2017]

Félix Arranz, editor and director

Jaume Prat Ortells, Anna Bach, Paula Esquinas, Elisabet Mallafré, associate editors

Ferràn Figuerola, associate industrial editor

Josep Cusidó, associate industrial editor

Marta Ferrer, associate industrial editor

Birgit Zondler, associate industrial editor

Vicente Martínez-Cosentino, associate industrial editor

Irene Elorza, associate industrial editor

Jordi Vallverdú, associate industrial editor

editorial board

guest participants: Santiago Alfonso, Eugeni Bach, Jordi Badía, Olga Felip, Borja Ferrater, Beth Galí, Jordi Ludevid, Fernando Marzá, Josep Lluís Mateo, Ariadna Perich, Xavier Torras.

industries board:

Cricursa · Lamp · Figueras · Geze · Cosentino · Pergo · Roca

institutional network

guest entities: Col·legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya (library) · Institut Ramon Llull · Arquitectes per l'Arquitectura · Associació Arquinfad del Foment de les Arts i el Disseny · Escola Tècnica Superior d'Arquitectura de Barcelona, UPC · LaSalle URL · ESARQ UIC · Catalunya Ràdio

scalae universal app >>> http://scalae.mobapp.at

[conversation]

Alvaro Siza Vieira talked to Félix Arranz at his studio. Also present were Jaume Prat Ortells and Juan Domingo Santos, who photographed the meeting. Siza told anecdotes from his student days, and then leaped forward to talk about his professional life at the time the conversation took place: summer 2014. The master architect from Porto described the arc of his life, beginning with a series of childhood scenes of domestic interiors and daydreams that seem like something straight out of a novel, but then moved firmly into the outside world, roaming the streets, at university, in libraries, and at work. He conjured up well-known figures who influenced him, such as Antoni Gaudí, Fernando Távora, or Alvar Aalto, along with subtler presences – or absences – that are harder to see. Siza described how what he had initially wanted to study was sculpture, as a means of personal expression, but then leaped back through time to the present, commenting on and criticizing some of the contradictions that arise in relation to being an architect in the contemporary international context.

My house was practically a public space...

When I was a child, the very heart of our house was the dining room. It was a house where there were aunts, uncles, my grandmother, my parents – a big house for a big family.

After a meal, the dining room became a workspace, a meeting place. My father corrected his students’ papers, my mother knitted, my aunts kept busy... The table often became a ping-pong table... Sometimes a bachelor uncle, who lived with the family, would sit me on his lap and ask me to draw. It was something he couldn’t do. At a certain point he started asking me to sign the drawings, and he kept them! My house was practically a public space. My memories are of doing things, much more than talking about them. Everyone had something of their own to work on.

My father loved opera. He had a lovely baritone voice, and at our annual Easter and Christmas parties, when all the family came together, he put on concerts for us. He sang, and one of my aunts, a piano teacher, played Chopin. My other two uncles acted out dialogues with jokes that annoyed the family. It was quite a show!

Until my fourth year of primary school I studied at home, in Matosinhos, with a governess who was practically a member of our family and came to our house to teach us. Then I went to secondary school in Porto. There was no secondary school in Matosinhos. We went by train every day. It was quite an adjustment because I was not used to social life outside the family. Suddenly I was surrounded by children who were older than me. The trip to Porto gave me a chance to talk with friends and read. I’ve never had so much time to read! My school was downtown. It was a forty-five minute trip, each way. I set out in the morning and came back in the afternoon. Sometimes I had to go home in the middle of the day, and that meant four trips. Three hours a day to read. I started reading classic children’s novels. After the war ended, Portugal experienced a relative opening up, culturally speaking, and our publishing houses started to publish foreign novels. I was excited by the new generation of American novelists: Steinbeck, Hemingway... French authors as well. They were a breath of fresh air that did me good.

Meals were important gatherings. The food was very good, cheap, and steady. When I think back, our meals were well-made but they were somewhat monotonous for us. This was because of people’s approach to health at the time: on Monday you ate this, on Tuesday you ate that... always the same. Every morning a fisherman came straight from the sea to drop off some fish at my parents’ house. The fish was magnificent! Other meat was not as good and it was expensive. Our household budget was quite tight back then. On my way home by train I would get off a few stops before my house, which saved me a few pennies every day. We all did it. There were five of us. My father was an engineer at a sugar refinery and he earned a good wage. But salaries were low, even for engineers.

Nowadays I don’t have such structured eating habits. These days we all worry about eating a healthy Mediterranean diet, but when I started living on my own there was no such notion. Nor did anyone think that smoking could hurt you. We all smoked. It was like a ritual: once you got to a certain age, you started to smoke. With food it was the same.

...life happened out on the streets...

It was many years before I started travelling (to see architecture), although between 1946 and 1950 my father rented a car with a driver each summer – since he didn’t know how to drive – and we went to Spain. They were splendid holidays that cost less than our normal holidays here in Portugal. We would leave for a month. My father loved travelling and he really enjoyed Spain. We went just as much for the pleasure of travelling as to save money: Spain was really very poor at the time. You could feel the effects of the Civil War. When we got back to Portugal it was wonderful. The roads were so much better! In Spain, before there were motorways, you had to drive through every town and city on the way. You were constantly passing through towns.

I went to Barcelona on one of those trips. I made a drawing of La Pedrera by Antoni Gaudí; I was around fourteen years old. But I wasn’t interested in architecture. Not at all. My father planned the trips carefully. He got more pleasure out of organizing our vacations than from the trip itself! He bought travel guides and would tell us about the places we were going to visit... When planning our trip to Catalonia he showed me photographs of Gaudí’s buildings. They looked like sculptures to me, which I was interested in. I visited lots of works by Gaudí: La Sagrada Familia, La Pedrera, La Casa Batlló, Parc Güell... I was interested in their form. I remember well that it was something new to me. I realized that the structures I found so inspiring were the same ones I had in my house: doors, windows... everything was the same, but somehow the result was fascinating.

Curiously, the first thing my father went to see in any city was the market. He said the market is like a window into a city’s soul. You can see what its people are really like.

One thing I noticed when we started going on these trips, when I was fourteen, was that the biggest difference between Spain and Portugal was that in Spain there were people on the streets. And women on the streets. Or in cafés. You didn’t see that here. Women didn’t go to cafés or smoke in public. That was impossible! In Spain, life happened out on the streets. Despite all the drama of the Spanish Civil War and everything that had happened, there was a sense of spirit there, a certain something ... For me, proof of Spain’s sense of unity is that I found that strong, cheerful sense of life on the streets of everywhere from Andalusia to Galicia. There were differences between cities, but this they shared. Portugal wasn’t like that. Spain was very poor and the atmosphere was different only in Barcelona and Madrid. In other cities, which were still marvellous, there were shortages of everything. Investment. We had to go to the best hotel in the city because the rest were horrible. The food was always good. But what made the biggest impact on me was their way of life.

...more than a visual pact...

The first teacher who showed an interest in my work was Fernando Távora. I later worked with him for a spell and we formed a life-long friendship. He gave me my first jobs in Matosinhos. Távora was ten years older than me. He started teaching when he was young, right after he got his degree. I was an average student. I’m referring to his generous spirit, his interest in people – not what we did: my projects were awful.

I remember the first time someone corrected one of my projects: Carlos Ramos, a fantastic person. He was the one who showed me was architecture really was. Ramos was from Lisbon, where he hadn’t been able to get a job. After two or three years he took over as headmaster; the previous fellow had been a painter, and when Ramos came in everything changed. He was an extraordinary person and a fine architect. He was quite dedicated to the school especially in the last few years of his life, at which point he stopped producing architecture to spend almost all his time there.

The first time he corrected my work, Carlos Ramos looked at my drawings and said to me ‘I can tell that you don’t have the slightest idea what architecture is about. Go to a good book shop and buy some magazines’. That’s what I did. It was a great piece of advice. I bought three copies of Architecture d’aujourd’hui, which was basically the only architecture magazine that you could get in Portugal. Only after the war had ended did Italian, English, and Japanese magazines start to arrive... One of them was about Alvar Aalto. I didn’t know who he was. Another was about Walter Gropius. I had heard of him because Ramos was a member of the Bauhaus School.

When I saw photographs of Aalto’s work I was amazed. The only time I had ever felt something similar before was when I visited Gaudí’s works. Aalto was magnificent. A shock to the system. I wouldn’t know how to explain why I felt that way. Somewhat later, information started trickling into Portugal, books... It started with someone who translated leaflets at school, which were less sophisticated. One of them was Sigfried Gideon’s critique of Alvar Aalto, interpreting the MIT student dormitories. That’s when I started to understand that architecture was more than a visual pact.

When I started my studies I was waiting for the time when I could switch to sculpture. I wasn’t interested in architecture. So the impact of starting school with that new generation of architects as our teachers, my contact with Távora’s studio, and the relative (although contradictory) political openness of the school are what fuelled my interest and dedication.

...information changed us...

When I started, just making ends meet was quite difficult. You had to keep a record of everything you spent. People only ate out on special occasions. Most meals were at home. At my parents’ house there was a servant, which was customary at the time: a house in exchange for accommodation and food. This changed quickly, but that’s how it was. There were remnants of that tradition in the economy and in the way food was prepared. If we bought vegetables at a grocer’s shop, they would write down how much we’d spent, and then we’d pay the total at the end of the month; the owner wrote down our bill, gave us a copy, and we paid. It was standard practice. Just about everyone did it because back then people tended to pay what they owed!

Later, banks made life easier, but one never knew what was financing them. Having such easy access to credit should be better controlled; being offered more than one needs is wrong. People end up paying for these mistakes, including those who are barely scraping by, them especially.

I started working by designing houses for some people my father knew. Small things, at the beginning, through the influence and good will of some family member or the architect Távora.

In my mind, the work of architects at the time fell into two categories: that of the major architects called upon to create public works and who were connected to the regime, and everyone else. There was very little work. It depended on family connections, and very little money was involved. The tradition of thrift, which had become totally natural to us, was part of the ideology of the regime, but it made it fun to accept these restrictions. Architects’ wages were low, but that was normal. Our family life was reflected by the fact that there was no television, nor did people go out.

I had some good times when I was young, despite all the restrictions I mentioned. But when I turned eighteen I started to feel like my family life and the neighbours were somewhat suffocating. Everyone was friends with the people who lived on their street. You went to each other’s birthday parties, but it was a small life. This you noticed when you reached the age where you had other ambitions. We needed information, we needed things to open up. And information changed us.

...there are no established routines...

At first I worked from home. Later I was able to take on one or two students to help me. Then came the apertura, Portugal’s opening up. The economy started to get better and I needed people to work for me. I hired young people. Some have been with me for more than thirty years. I’ve also collaborated temporarily with young people who come to learn and gain experience before starting their own studios. Each person takes part in the project development according to their previous experience. From the outset, they organize programmes and materials and build models. Later, they develop the details, always in very good company. I feel the need, when designing, to work as part of a team.

From the start of each project we work with engineers and collaborators. Eventually computers were introduced and this changed our working method somewhat, but it’s ultimately not all that different.

The work my collaborators do depends on the phase the project is in. At the beginning I choose someone who is used to my way of working. Then the team has to be reinforced: when we’re up against a really tight deadline, or during building itself. In general, during construction - when there is construction - someone monitors the work from start to finish, visits the site with me, and keeps the studio informed. That person helps me with all the arrangements... which can be so boring and sterilizing!

You can’t always do things the same way or make the days follow similar patterns. The circumstances are always different: it depends who who works on a project, its developer, what his or her personality is like, the near or distant influences that exist... What fuels the project varies greatly. But the way we actually go about our projects doesn’t vary that much. You gather the essential documents, make every effort for them to be sufficient: topography, photographs, programme... I often commission more in-depth studies, even in the first phase, while others work on the general idea without having all the information available. But, over time, the idea and the information develop. The others keep me informed, so that I don’t have to put in so much time to take control of things.

I do not have established routines. When I started, the jobs I took on were modest and the costs of running a studio with a few people and a bit of work were minimal. Today a young person who starts out, working practically from home, can hardly do anything! That wasn’t the case before. And there were no taxes either. All the equipment you needed was a drafting table, a T-square, and a set square. And later a room – just the one – in Porto. All the accounts were small. In Portugal, these limitations, to put it politely, were offset by a modest sense of stability. The years went by and the potatoes cost the same. People turned off the lights to save money...

...things I had never seen.

I recently received a letter from France for a project I worked on in the north of the country, a church, which I’d already sent off. The letter was written by a man I don’t know, a specialist of some sort. It’s a truly insulting letter in which he tells me that the church is all wrong: the waterproofing, the walls. Everything. And it was built by a very competent team of French architects. Nevertheless, his main criticism was that I dared to specify what the carpentry for the project should be like. He asked me how I had dared use my talent for that and advised me to limit myself to developing the concept, and to leave the carpentry to the specialists.

This is a widespread problem. Particularly in Europe.

Now I’m working in China and I love it. They respect the entire project. They let architects work together with the team. The core team includes Chinese engineers, whereas here we only have consultants at the start of the project. In China they monitor the work and are very respectful. As a result, the construction has turned out impeccably. There is no fragmentation between the interior and the exterior, as is usually the case in the world of architecture. The structure is white concrete, which is perfect...

I went to China six times during the construction, a difficult trip at my age, and I saw things I had never seen before. I visited India, too. I saw historical things and contemporary things.

In Taiwan I visited a university founded in the 1950s or 1960s, it was magnificent. I asked who the architect was. It was Ieoh Ming Pei. Pei’s first piece of work. When I visited it I told myself that I had seen it before. And later I thought of Pei... Pei started working with Gropius. And the thing is, I had seen the plans for that project in the first magazine on Gropius I ever bought.

Travel is the most essential means by which architects can learn and grow. That is why the Erasmus programme is fundamental. It will certainly bear fruit. If these sterilizing policies end, a lucid, well-qualified generation of architects is sure to follow.

Going back to France... what’s curious is that there were revision processes and we have assistants there, very good architects. When we were ready to start construction, this man shows up saying that the builders won’t put up with so much control and oversight. And if it’s done the way he says it must be, I will have to withdraw from it. I don’t know northern Europe well, but this is the kind of thing that’s happening there. You can still get work done in Switzerland. But France, Portugal, Italy, or even Spain, from what I’ve heard, countries that were once exemplary in terms of how the building process was organized, are collapsing.

[nuances]

At a second encounter, in autumn 2015, this time in the company of Marta Ferrer, an industrial publisher and an associate editor of the scalae collection, our intention was to delve more deeply into those aspects that are essential to understanding Alvaro Siza Vieira’s personal and professional positions and proposals. Once again, what emerges is Siza’s social and political commitment, the sense of compulsory versatility in the use of materials and construction techniques, and his sadness and frustration at the sterility of some processes or players that supposedly guarantee certain technical, administrative, or quality-related aspects of the architectural process. He also touches on Granada and the Alhambra, music, poetry, and the Carnation Revolution, before finally returning to his beginnings as he speaks of the dual nature of intimate affection, an affection that is explicit, protesting, in terms of how it is materialized as sculpture; but silent, secret, impossible to put into words, yet glorious in the strokes of his drawings.

Principles: I am a Euro-enthusiast, but not this Europe...

I am a Euro-enthusiast, but not this Europe. Not what it is turning into. There are areas of architecture that architects are not allowed to take part in. Architects must abandon certain aspects of construction because now insurance companies are in charge, experts whom no one knows. Architecture is in crisis. That is obvious. The fact remains, however, that there are architects who are able to make high-quality work because they have found a good developer. But in general that’s not the case.

Architecture is not dying. But I do believe that these ideas regulating the European Union, mandatory and blind, and that are all about interests, are damaging architecture. If twice the equipment is necessary, it’s because someone is gaining from that. Interests have replaced politics.

The political idea of the European Union has disappeared. However, politics are more present than ever, although they have been transformed into something else. They say that people spent more than they should have, that all that debt is the people’s fault – not the fault of those who encouraged that sort of borrowing. So it’s the people who should pay for what happened. The so-called Troika forced Portugal into three barbaric years of sacrifice. And the country is worse off with regard to everything. All the statistics are worse. But the government, with the support of the European Union, said that it had to blindly continue.

And what’s more [ironically, his hands and eyebrows raised]: many of those responsible for all this believe Portugal is a fantastic example for other countries to follow.

Processes: ...the first thing to think about is the architecture itself...

In my studio there are many samples of materials because these can no longer be defined at the project stage. This is due to the lack of trust in architects. At construction sites it seems that corruption is implicit, and it can appear in many different forms. So you start to work and the contractor comes up with alternatives that we must get to know. You can’t specify a particular material or model at the planning stage, but instead have to say “such-and-such type of model or something similar”. I don’t have the power to make them accept my opinion or do what I ask.

In public construction, managers are always hired, and they administer more money than those working at the planning stage. They make more money than the planners and have more power than the planners. In Portugal, when I present a project, I have to sign a document that makes me responsible for everything: my work, the builder’s work... But when I get to the building site, if something has been done wrong and I say it needs to be corrected, the project manager is in charge. I’m told there is no time to change it, it must stay as it is, and that’s how it remains. So, if the project is municipal, you call the mayor, you tell him something terrible is happening, but sometimes the mayor, after consulting with the manager, calls me to say there’s no time to fix it.

The first thing to think about is architecture itself. Not only in terms of materials, but the entire concept. This is what gives you a different, or complementary, sensitivity. Not long ago I designed a building in Switzerland, some pharmaceutical labs. The developer requested that they be made of glass. Industrial construction. I was indifferent. I had to work with other things and other protagonists. But that doesn’t matter.

Anyone making a building from stone and mortar can make something hi-tech if they have control over the conditions and those involved. If you’re in that position, you can work with your materials as perfectly and precisely as a mason works with stone. One must always have the capacity for dialogue and an attitude of non-arrogance.

Arrogance feeds on human weakness.

Situations: ...Granada is a human environment...

I visited Granada when I was a child. Well, I wasn’t that young, I was around 18 years old. I hadn’t started my career in architecture. A visit to Granada is a dream in itself. You don’t need to dream there! It’s got the Alhambra, the Fundación Rodríguez Acosta, the patio houses, the people... The joy of Andalusia can be felt in the streets... That’s how one feels in the south. Granada is a human environment. So strong. So alive.

Juan Domingo Santos and I are in charge of the entrance to the Alhambra. The atrium. One of the challenges of the project has been not touching the magnificent cypress trees alongside the building. The building’s expression is connected to these trees.

(In South Korea and in China the developers asked me to incorporate sculptures into my projects. I’ve had two or three exhibitions of my sculptures in wood. In South Korea they asked me for some figures at the building entrance. I made them in marble. They are like figures who receive the visitors. They were cut with a laser from a single block. They have the same function as the lamp and ironwork elements poised at the entrance to the Faculty of Journalism in Santiago. It is an interesting idea taken from some buildings in Lisbon, where, at the entrance, there is a figure who receives you. It’s an 18th-century custom.)

At the Alhambra it’s the cypress trees that welcome you.

We wanted to develop the project horizontally, but from the start we talked about using apparently obvious motifs, such as pergolas or vine arbours, because there has to be shade. So, it’s all there. I used to tell my students to look first at the ground and then upwards. That’s sort of what we did in Granada.

I like the Spanish song, Granada, tierra soñada por mí… [he sings, hand outstretched]. I collect music. I have a collection of CDs, like anyone else. I don’t usually listen to music on the computer. I like jazz... There’s also a fantastic album by Paco Ibáñez, where he sings the great poets, with that marvellous version of the poem by Miguel Hernández, Andaluces de Jaén. There’s also a version by Jarcha... Andaluces de Jaén, aceituneros altivos… [he sings, and stretches out his hand once more]

On the night of 24 April 1974 I was at my house with some friends. We put on that record by Paco Ibáñez and stayed up until the wee hours, listening to it and singing along. The mood in Portugal was as warm as the poem!

A friend called me at five o’clock in the morning, after having said goodnight at three o’clock. He told me what was happening and I thought he had gone crazy. I turned on the radio and they were playing only military marches...

...There had been a revolution.

Everything else: ...the same family

As I mentioned so many times at the beginning of the conversation, when I was fifteen I was interested in sculpture. I tried working with clay. I always wanted to be a sculptor. My family convinced me to do something more serious, like architecture, which they accepted peacefully. So I changed. Then I became truly interested in architecture.

Sculpture returned much later, relatively recently, because I exhibited drawings at the ARCO Art Fair in Spain. After the exhibition they called me from the Fundación ICO asking me to create some sculptures. So, my first exhibition was in Madrid in 1998. Between the ages of fifteen and sixty-five there was only architecture. Now I have many drawings I hope to convert into sculptures.

In Spain there was an extraordinary sculptor, a genius: Eduardo Chillida. Well, there was Picasso before that, extraordinary, unfailing. But Chillida started by studying architecture, and the form he used to occupy space is the form of architecture. Chillida called me saying that he had been commissioned to make a sculpture in the garden next to the Museum of Santiago de Compostela, and that he wanted to talk to me. I met with him. After spending the entire day at the construction site he called me again and said he finally knew where to place the sculpture.

We met and went to the highest place in the garden, where there was a terrace, behind the convent. From the terrace you could see all the towers of Santiago. He liked it there because you could see all those towers. We started to discuss it but he suddenly stopped and said he wasn’t satisfied, that we had better come back at another time. The next day he called me at the end of the afternoon and said now he was satisfied. The new site was another terrace halfway up the site. He was pleased because from there you could see the towers of Santiago, but you could also see the gap left by the corner of the new museum building, which his sculpture would somehow compensate for. He had found a way to tie the space together, and made it look three times as big.

Space is the material we build with. I choose to focus on the relationship between the pieces, many of them anthropomorphic, and on the resulting space.

When the sculptures are being made, there is a pleasure that comes from being with the workforce: the craftsmen, the carpenters... Not to mention the computer specialists who draw the models in three dimensions.

I worked with a blacksmith who had mountains of old iron. There were people welding, and they told me they really liked working on my sculptures because it was always different. It wasn’t something mechanical, like making iron windows. They took pleasure in it.

Sculpture gives you more joy because there are less obstacles than in architecture, because it is not part of a long project and there are no legal restrictions.

Sculpting is something I do for long periods of time. Sculpture. But it’s not a substitute for architecture.

When I have a sculpture exhibition I feel like people think it’s a daring undertaking. An architect making sculptures! One thing is hard to deny these days: you can see that the subject of many sculptors’ work is architecture.

Behind a sculpture installation there is architecture and there is also the architectural project.

They are from the same family.

[expression]

In this ebook we have expanded the illustration section, which is usually made up of nine plates that form a sort of exhibition, by including four photographs that show some of Alvaro Siza Vieira’s sculptures. The genetics of these sculptures can be observed in the sketches and plans that make up the nine drawings. The first photo is of one of the figures in the 2008 exhibition in Lecce, the second and third are from the 2013 exhibition in Gaeta, and the fourth is of a group of figures from the set entitled “Friendship” for the Shihlien Office Building in Jiangsu, 2014.

In addition to the nine original drawings there is a tenth which contains Siza’s contribution to the scalae aquarium: a fish with feet.

[references]

Twelve online references about Alvaro Siza. The first two are his profiles on scalae.net (1) and Wikipedia (2). The following five references are works selected by Siza himself. Three of them he feels to be representative of his entire career, namely the Piscinas de Marés public pool complex in Leça de Palmeira, 1962 (3); two residential buildings in The Hague, 1988 (4); and the Porto School of Architecture, completed in 1996 (5). Two were at the project stage at the time this book was going to print, the pavilion for Casa Wabi foundation in Mexico (6), and the new entrance for the Alhambra palace in Granada (7). Josep Quetglas’s article on Siza’s gaze and his drawings, in the online magazine WAM, is the eighth item on the list (8). These references are completed by four videos: the first is a documentary by Juan Martín de Blas, with Manuel Vicent, for the series Elogio de la Luz [In praise of light], from 2003 (9); the next is Fernando Guerra’s funny music video in which, as he works away, Alvaro Siza hums a Beatles song about getting old (10); and the last two are talks given at the MoMA in New York (in English, 11), and at the Architecture and Society Foundation’s 2014 Necessary Architecture conference in Pamplona (in Spanish, 12).

01: Profile of Alvaro Siza Vieira on scalae.net

02: wikipedia: Alvaro Siza

03: Piscinas de Marés public pools at Leça de Palmeira

04: Two residential buildings in The Hague

05: School of Architecture at the University of Porto

06: Pavilion for the Casa Wabi Foundation

07: Entrance to the Alhambra palace, Granada

08: The Breathing of the Regard, article by Josep Quetglas in WAM. 1996

09: RTVE Elogio de la luz [In praise of light], Alvaro Siza. Orden en el caos [Order in chaos]. 2003. 30'22'' (video in Spanish)

10: Siza sings | Film by Fernando Guerra 2011. 3'12''

11: Lecture by Alvaro Siza, MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, NY. 2013. 1h30'40''

12: Lecture by Alvaro Siza, Necessary Architecture Conference at the Architecture and Society Foundation. 2014. 52'26'' (video in Spanish)

Alvaro Siza was born in Matosinhos (Portugal) in 1933 and studied architecture at the former School of Fine Arts at the University of Porto. He was a lecturer at the school between 1966 and 1969 and returned there in 1976. He has also been a guest lecturer at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, at the University of Pennsylvania; Los Andes University of Bogota; and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. He worked with Fernando Távora between 1955 and 1958, and has also collaborated with Eduardo Souto de Moura on works such as the Portuguese pavilions at Expo ‘98 in Lisbon and Expo 2000 in Hannover, and at the Serpentine Pavilion in London in summer 2005.

Among Siza’s earliest acclaimed works is the public pool complex he built in the 1960s in Leça da Palmeira, north of Porto. In 1977, after the Carnation Revolution, the city of Évora commissioned Siza to design a housing project in the rural outskirts of the town. Siza was also a member of the team that rebuilt Chiado, the historic centre of Lisbon, which was destroyed by a fire in 1988. Most of his best-known works are in Porto: the Boa Nova Tea House (1963), the School of Architecture (1987–1993), and the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art (1997). In 1987, Spanish architect Rafael Moneo, then dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, organized the first exhibition of Siza’s work in the United States.

Alvaro Siza has received numerous prizes and awards in Portugal and worldwide, including the 1992 Pritzker Prize, Portugal’s National Architecture Prize in 1993, the Golden Lion at the 2002 Venice Architecture Biennale, and gold medals from the RIBA and IUA in 2011. He has been awarded honorary degrees by the Polytechnic University of Valencia; the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne; and the University of Palermo. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an honorary fellow of the AIA, the RIBA, the French Academy of Architecture, and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.

(CV courtesy of the Architecture and Society Foundation)

[editorial]

...a sculptor in love.

by Félix Arranz

I want to describe in detail how the excitement of sharing a conversation with Alvaro Siza, about Alvaro Siza, forces you to look for a way to counterbalance the sense of complicity with his reserve and his silence (a complicity he never asked for). This counterbalance has to do with saving both Siza and the reader from finding themselves up against the dull wall of a story told through the same old questions and observations that are asked time and again of this, one of the most frequently interviewed architects in the world, and which tend to lead to cautious answers that are much alike one another and that fit perfectly with a legend that has been wrought year by year, word by word, interview by interview.

The aim of the documents that make up this book – conversation, nuances, personal drawings (expression), and references – is to provide materials that enable the reader to connect the principles, processes, and situations that interviewees like Alvaro Siza describe with the way they express themselves as players who create and construct the places that people experience, live in, and work in... In this particular case, however, we mustn’t overlook the article “The Breathing of the Regard” that Josep Quetglas published exactly 20 years ago, in 1996, in the online magazine WAM. In it, Quetglas, that reflective, sensitive, shrewd professor from the Balearic Islands, gave a masterclass on understanding and discovering Siza, his drawings, and his vision. Siza himself contributed to deciphering this vision (1), with clues (2) provided by a mysterious friend whose identity was never revealed.

On another level, one that’s also personal, excruciatingly personal, and is also about unsolicited but unavoidable silences, Valdemar Cruz’s recent article “Os misterios de Maria Antónia [The mysteries of Maria Antónia]” (3) plays a part in arousing sufficient suspicion, together with the testimony included in the 2005 exhibition and catalogue for the Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid (4) “Maria Antonia Siza 1940–1973”, over the hypothesis that I am discreetly putting forward here. This hypothesis is that Siza establishes the closest connections with those beings who live in his memory through the delicate, continual, uninterrupted movements of his hand as it draws and draws and draws and draws some more... A lifelong, uninterrupted connection with the genuine, crisp, real presence of his love for them, for Maria Antónia, which he relives in every gesture, every new drawing.

Despite everything, given these precedents and silences, my attempt to take on the epic task, the mutual effort, of another conversation, a new conversation, with Siza about Siza, seemed justified on at least two counts (5): first, the fact that this collection of ebooks is freely available to anyone with internet access and some sort of digital reading device, and that it is translated into three languages (Spanish, English, and Catalan) means that it might expand people’s direct, unmediated access to the committed discourse and particular form of expression of the great master from Porto. At the same time, it provides a wonderful window onto architecture and the tribulations of architects for people anywhere on earth who, for whatever reason, lack the resources, excuse, or time needed to enact the conventional rituals of visiting architectural works in their actual physical context or through the words and drawings in books or publications in libraries or bookshops. These may be people making their first forays into the world of architecture, people for whom Siza will prove to be the most human of guides, a wonderful host, and a strict teacher. That alone is reason enough.

But there is another vital reason: the suspicion that something remains unsettled, the certainty that emphasizing Siza’s professional work as an architect might hide his original, more visceral motivations and longings. Siza starts each of his interviews and conversations with the warning that it wasn’t architecture he set out to study, but sculpture. In other words, as he has mentioned repeatedly both expressly and in passing, his original vocation was not to offer his services to the community as an architect, but rather as a sculptor.

The words that pick out Siza’s personal story over the course of these ten chapters have been rearranged through a collective process that has taken almost two years to complete, one that Siza has endorsed and that has involved Jaume Prat Ortells editing the transcripts of two conversations that were recorded in Siza’s studio on Rua de Aleixo. These texts tell a story that stops being the official version precisely at the point when this change in professional direction that Siza has spoken of a thousand times is no longer interpreted as an anecdote but rather as the foundation of Siza’s mostly deeply held principles, as a driver for the processes he has put into action throughout his career, as the spirit embodied by his architecture and, ultimately, by his beloved sculpture. This shift, this assertion, which is far from anecdotal and which is documented here and now in what really are Siza’s own words, and in the early sketches for his sculptures, bring new meaning to the entire personal story of this lauded architect. It reveals that in order to listen to Siza, to truly pay attention to him, you must believe him when he claims time and again that he is a sculptor. That is, an artist. That is his desire.

For both of these reasons, then, this ebook sets out to be a place where Siza the sculptor’s story of himself and the aura of his discreet lovelorn silence can coexist with a small collection of drawings in which his sculptor’s gaze explores – so that his architect’s hand can then draft – the materials and systems, context and connections, and research and character of a form of architecture that really wants to be sculpture. Or, as Siza explained in the dense, aromatic cloud of smoke that filled his workshop, while Marta Ferrer looked on, fascinated, this publication may be the realization of a lingering desire of his as both artist and person.

An artist that explores, projects, and constructs relationships between figures, couples, and peers, relationships that are perhaps ones of absence, or perhaps of presence, or are perhaps eternally enthralled.

As I said, this had been a lingering doubt, but it isn’t any more. We’ve settled it. Hang on a minute! What about the fish with feet? (7).

F.A., spring 2016

(1) As if this wasn’t enough, before Josep Quetglas’s article was published, another of the professors who was part of the hardworking WAM editorial team, Carles Muro, had already compiled the original Portuguese versions of all of Siza’s texts together with Catalan translations of them, in the book Alvaro Siza. Escrits (Barcelona: UPC, 1994). Muro’s book includes a complete bibliography for these writings which pinpoints different versions and editions of these up to the time of print.

(2) This is the clue: “There was, this friend told me, something about his projects that I could sense although I didn’t know what to call it and couldn’t consciously perceive it. I had an intuition of tense inner workings in his desire to do away with everything by running out into the open air, slipping away through the curtains he was opening. I could feel how urgently he wanted to break out from within a heavy hermetically sealed container that was stuck to his chest like a wet sheet. Now I understand where that sensation came from: Siza perceives space as though it were pressure squeezing on his lungs, forcing him to respond by groping his way out with his eyes, turning and pushing through walls so desperate is he to let his eyes breathe. The gaze cannot be shut away, left to bounce blindly off these surfaces. Instead it has to be able to slip away, foreshortened, along some diagonal or other, until it finds itself in the open air. When you go inside a building, the first thing you look for is always whether or not there is a way out. The urge to leave is what finds the escape path. What brings satisfaction is not actually being outside in the open air but rather the act of escaping the suffocation and finding your way out. What’s going on is that Siza suffers from claustrophobia.”

(3) Published in November 2015 in the weekly magazine Jornal Expresso #2245,

http://leitor.expresso.pt/#library/expresso/semanario2245/revista-e-2245/-e/mulher-de-siza

(4) The exhibition was coordinated by Alessandro Ryder, Laura Manzano, and Lucas García, and the catalogue included texts by Alvaro Siza: “(…) A sheaf of pieces of A4 paper were filled with wonderful beings, beautiful, long-suffering, or ironic beings, or ones that were simply happy. Their eyes and hands, the nervous ankles and the clothing exposed to the four winds, all these told stories. If we wished to pin down those eyes and gestures we would find it unbearable. It would be an experience as fascinating as it was painful, one that was highly revealing. After a few hours, the maple wood table was filled with our lives and others’ lives, with time immemorial, sometimes with overwhelming suffering and enthusiasm and desire and joy. Birth, plenitude, death(…)”, Bernardo Pinto de Almeida, José Luis Porfirio, and Juan Miguel Hernández de León.

http://www.circulobellasartes.com/fich_libro/arch_fich_libro_20.pdf

(5) Three, in fact, if you take the claim that Josep Quetglas opens his article with as a condition: “I don’t like talking about people who can talk about themselves. I believe that, while they are still alive, their propensity to talk or to keep silent forms part of their work, it is their exclusive right, and we shouldn’t meddle in it with our chatter. We should let them become part of posterity by themselves, however they want or are able to. They do not belong to us, and it is not our place to comment on or describe anything that implies making a fuss or interfering with whatever they want to leave behind”.

(6) Fernando Guerra, in his short film “Siza Sings” (2012), gave us a taste of Alvaro Siza’s vitality and sense of humour while he works. I myself was part of a funny, unusual turn of events one night on the streets of Salamanca at the end of the 1990s. Siza, spurred on by the challenge of recording his imposing voice saying “WAM!”, a recording which was going to be used in “Who is saying WAM?”, a guessing game in the pastimes section of the online magazine of the same name, associated the acronym with a barking sound. He ended up barking a question that came with an answer to anyone who crossed our path that night: “WAM?… WAM!” People inevitably reacted with a smile. Kind, complicit, oblivious to fear, because such colossal kindheartedness even when he is working or wandering around at night, messing around by barking out words with no apparent meaning, is impossible to hide.

(7) Perhaps that fish with feet hints of some unfinished business in editorial terms, even if that something is well-known has been experienced by all those who have shared a stage or a table with Alvaro Siza: the need to document his delicious, vital sense of humour as a collection or exhibition (6). In this case, the fish with feet is both an echo of and the fruit of another encounter, which took place against the deafening backdrop of a restaurant in Navarre, when Alvaro Siza misheard our request for a drawing of a fish for the scalae aquarium, which Patxi Mangado had passed on to him, as “feet” instead of “fish”. (The two words sound very similar in both Spanish and Portuguese and can easily be confused depending how loudly the speaker says them, how good the other person’s hearing is, and how much background noise there is). Ever since, Siza’s bare feet have been paddling in the scalae fish tank on Facebook, and the fish with feet has finally become part of the scalae aquarium.

[get involved]

Sharing this content through social networks is very simple: most ebook devices and apps allow you to highlight a paragraph or phrase and share it via your Facebook or Twitter account (once you have set up this feature on your device).

We welcome new articles, opinions, or comments on these conversations with Alvaro Siza Vieira, his personal work, or his professional work as architect. Proposals* should be sent to ebooks@scalae.net. If accepted by the editorial board, texts will be published on the scalae.net site and may be included in the corresponding “...about” volume of the scalae ebook collection.

*Texts must not exceed 4000 characters including spaces in the language of the writer’s choice. The author(s) should establish a critical connection between their own professional background or personal interests and the world of architecture or that of agents that have been published or written about in a scalae “...self” ebook.

For further information, see the articles in the documents section on www.scalae.net

[acknowledgements]

We would like to thank the people and companies that form part of the editorial and industries advisory boards for the scalae architecture + architects international ebook collection for their support, hard work, and recommendations. We are also deeply grateful to the organizations and institutions that were invited to take part in the initiative through the scalae institutional and subscription network. Their inspiration and generosity helped us launch the collection while honing the principles we have learned from them and building shared processes and objectives that converge in this publication, which will reach the hands of architecture enthusiasts thanks to everyone who played a part in creating it.

We wish to thank Alvaro Siza Vieira for his enthusasiam and that of the people who work with him – Anabela Monteiro, who is always attentive, efficient and charming, and Ana Silva, who is both patient and diligent. Their dedication and hard work have made this ebook into a publication that faithfully documents the ideas and creations of the maestro from Porto and sheds light on different ways of approaching and resolving architectural projects and works. These variations are manifest in the range of players involved in creating the multiple formats that are all ultimately interpreted as architecture.

It has taken a long time for this book to come to fruition, but it would have taken even longer had it not been for the care, support, and help we received from Juan Domingo Santos, who found a way to help us finish it and share it at the launch of the Spanish-language edition at the School of Architecture (ETSA) at the University of Granada. At the presentation in the ETSA lecture theatre, we discussed Siza’s influence and the current state of architecture in Portugal and Andalusia. With us at the event were Nuno Grande and Carmen Moreno, who gave presentations and then responded to observations from Jose María Manzano (director of ETSA), Luis Alberto Martínez (dean of the Official College of Architects of Granada), Paloma Baquero, Ángel Gijón, Elisa Valero, Antonio Cayuelas, Blanca Espigares, and Jorge Contreras. We are grateful to all of them for their support, intensity, and generosity.

Filipa Guerreiro and Tiago Correia at the atelier da bouça literally opened up their house not only to those of us involved in making this book but also, by extension, to friends and students, both our own and other people’s. Our thanks for their selfless complicity and generosity in taking us in with so much warmth.

We are also grateful for the photos that Alvaro Siza himself kindly provided, and for the snapshots that Jaume Prat Ortells and Juan Domingo Santos took when we recorded the first conversation with Siza and which really add a more human side to the photographs in this book. We appreciate the plans, photographs, and sketches provided by the Alvaro Siza Archive to complete the illustrations and five references available at scalae.net (from two projects and three built works).

We owe a special thanks to Marta Ferrer, at FIGUERAS, for selflessly providing support during many of the negotiations needed to put this book together, and to Santiago Alfonso and Vicente Martínez-Cosentino at COSENTINO, who took it upon themselves to organize and oversee the resources needed, especially the logistics for the launch of the Spanish-language edition in Granada, together with the SCALAE editorial-industries board.

The teamwork and frank, open collaboration between industry representatives and architects that scalae seeks to foster and nourish through the many initiatives of its editorial and industrial board are made possible by the drive and motivation of those who are on the front line of interactions as part of the sales and technical teams at the companies that are actively involved in scalae’s boards: thank you to Manel López, Amalia Ventura, Montse Arnau, José Luis Ruiz de Valdivia, and Javier Pelegrí for their quiet, friendly, and productive work.

It may come as a surprise that we would single certain individuals out in our list of institutional acknowledgements, but it would be unfair not to dwell on the fact that this ebook collection would never have reached such a wide audience had it not been for people like Lluis Comerón or Fernando Marzá at the Association of Architects of Catalonia (COAC) and its archives, or Jordi Ros and Cristina Jover at the Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB UPC) and the Department of Architectural Projects at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, all of whom have supported this project from the outset.

We would also like to thank Apple and Amazon for including the scalae ebooks in their stores.

[tech]

This issue of the scalae architecture + architects international ebook collection is a “draft” version of the ...self volume on the architects Alvaro Siza Vieira. Its Book ID is: scalae.net-siza-self-draftENG-20170403-01. The issue became available online on 3 April 2017. (please see the complete explanation of the collection for more information)

The scalae architecture + architects international ebook collection distributed by archBIB as mobi and ePub files can be read using a range of devices: Smartphones (Apple iPhone, Android, and Windows), tablets (Apple iPad, Android, and Windows), ebook readers (Kindle® and ePub), and computers (using Kindle® or ePub reading apps).

+Apple iPad, iPhone: by opening the epub files you received by email using the preinstalled iBooks app

+The Kindle app can also be downloaded for iPhone and iPad, in which case download the mobi file version of the ebook.

+Android and Windows: using the Kindle app, in which case you need to download the mobi file,

+Android and Windows: using ePub reading apps, in which case download the ePub file.

Computer options, all of which use ePub files:

+Adobe Digital Editions is the official (free) application

+ Sony ereader

There is also a Kindle app for computers, in which case you need to download the mobi file format of the ebook.

Barcelona, April 2017

[scalae podcast (in Spanish)]

Many of the conversations with Félix Arranz which form the raw material for scalae’s architectural documents are freely available for anyone with an mp3 player to listen to. They are available (in Spanish) as podcasts at scalae.net or through the scalae app and can be listened to on your computer or smartphone. Each podcast is about an hour long.

scalae.net/podcasts

The podcast of the first conversation in this ebook is a long, relaxed conversation in which the prevailing force is the deep voice of Alvaro Siza Vieira as he comments, complains, and even sings while sketching the portrait that can be seen in the final photograph in this ebook...

scalae.net/podcasts/234

[collection catalogue]

published ebooks...

· ebook “Oriol Bohigas ...by himself”

· ebook “Josep Camps y Olga Felip ...by themselves”

· ebook “Josep Ferrando ...by himself”

· ebook “Anna and Eugeni Bach ...by themselves”

· ebook “RCR arquitectos ...by themselves”

· ebook “Jaume Prat Ortells ...questions from”

· ebook “Alvaro Siza Vieira ...by himself”

· ebook “Debate BIA-AR 2014 principios: Lacaton, Mangado, Sejima”

[copyright]

This is the seventh book in the scalae architecture + architects international ebook collection. Alvaro Siza Vieira illustrates and shares a magical voyage on which his path is crossed by the deepest of feelings, the fundamentals of his principles and ways of creating, and his experiences as a citizen, architect, and sculptor. As he wanders, he talks, smokes, sings, tells of his troubles, and protests about things that lack meaning, all the while sketching the slim silhouette of a woman who expresses the quiet pleasure of someone who has just raised her glass to toast another person whose own glass is also visible in Siza’s delicate drawing.

It is a voyage that spans the architect’s life and memory, squeezed into a form of time that is simultaneously past, present, and future. In it, the master architect from Porto shows his affection for the people who, through their silence or their words, have been or still are somewhere on his horizon. People and architecture that throb in the hands of a tireless draughtsman, architect, and sculptor who, true to his Portuguese roots, is in love with the oceans of beauty and life.

The ebooks that make up the scale architecture + architects collection are free and cannot be resold. If any reader who comes across these free books would like to express their satisfaction with them in a material form, we suggest they make a donation to support the work of  Arquitectes Sense Fronteres. [Architecture without Borders]. Copies distributed by Amazon as Kindle ebooks or paperbacks may involve minimal costs (and thus a small cover price) that are directly related to Amazon’s digital community services or to the processes of typesetting, printing, and distributing the books. For more information, visit scalae.net

(cc) 2017 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (by-nc-sa). You may not use this work or any work derived from it for commercial purposes. Any resulting work may only be distributed under a license identical to this one.

v. 1.0 Siza ENG

Table of Contents

SCALAE | Alvaro Siza Vieira | ...by himself

[index]

[issue credits. 2017]

[scalae international ebook collection]

[collection credits. 2017]

IMG human: Alvaro Siza, by Juan Domingo Santos

[conversation]

My house was practically a public space...

...life happened out on the streets...

...more than a visual pact...

...information changed us...

...there are no established routines...

...things I had never seen.

IMG Expo Alvaro Siza architetto - Museo Provinciale S. Castromediano, Lecce, Arquivo Àlvaro Siza

[nuances]

Principles: I am a Euro-enthusiast, but not this Europe...

Processes: ...the first thing to think about is the architecture itself...

Situations: ...Granada is a human environment...

Everything else: ...the same family

IMG Expo Personaggi - Pinacoteca Comunale d'Arte Contemporanea Giovanni da Gaeta, Gaeta, Arquivo Àlvaro Siza

IMG Expo Personaggi - Pinacoteca Comunale d'Arte Contemporanea Giovanni da Gaeta, Gaeta, Arquivo Àlvaro Siza

[expression]

1998 Expo David + Goliath ARCO Madrid

1998 Expo Escultura el placer de trabajar ICO Madrid

2007 Expo Desenhos esculturas FIL Lisboa

2008 Expo Alvaro Siza Architetto, Lecce

2009 Expo Desenhos esculturas FIL Lisboa

2013 Shihlien Office Building, Jiangsu

2013 Expo Personaggi, Gaeta

2013 Expo Personaggi 2, Gaeta

2014 Friendship - Shihlien Office Building, Jiangsu

2016 Fish with feet

[references]

QRs

ref: Piscinas de Marés public pools at Leça de Palmeira

ref: Two residential buildings in The Hague

ref: School of Architecture at the University of Porto

ref: Pavilion for the Casa Wabi Foundation

ref: Entrance to the Alhambra palace, Granada

[editorial]

...a sculptor in love.

IMG Friendship - Shihlien Office Building 10-14, Huai'an City, Jiangsu, China, Arquivo Àlvaro Siza

[get involved]

[acknowledgements]

[tech]

IMG human: Alvaro Siza, by Juan Domingo Santos

IMG human: Àlvaro Siza, by Jaume Prat Ortells

IMG human: Àlvaro Siza, by Jaume Prat Ortells

[scalae podcast (in Spanish)]

[collection catalogue]

[copyright]