The book List of Álvaro Siza
monade — Daniela Sá
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One of the most consistent and yet fully surprising architects working today, Álvaro Siza is the author of a rigorous and obsessive work, deeply rooted in a deference towards local material, craftwork, topography, local light, ever without falling into the sentimentality of excluding rational form and modern techniques. His buildings are many times described as being unphotogenic, even mute. His approach is patently tactile and tectonic, rather than visual and graphic.
Always smoking, one suspects that that is only a pretext for lengthy observations without apology, exercises of sharp attention in which his work seems to arise from.
Now the Pritzker Prize shares the books that have marked him the most through his life. Álvaro Siza’s List spans from fundamental editions on Alvar Aalto or Walther Gropius, to lesser-known Italian modernism, Brazil, critical history and philosophy, a striking novel, and poetry – a lot of poetry – from Portuguese to Greek and Persian masters.
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Um dos mais consistentes e, contudo, surpreendentes arquitectos da actualidade, Álvaro Siza é autor de uma obra rigorosa e obsessiva, profundamente enraizada numa atenção aos materiais e modos de fazer de cada local, à topografia, à luz de cada lugar, sem nunca cair no sentimentalismo de excluir uma enorme racionalidade no seu desenho e o uso de técnicas mais recentes. As suas obras são muitas vezes descritas como não sendo fotogénicas, mesmo quase mudas. A sua abordagem é pacientemente táctil e tectónica, em vez de visual e gráfica.
Sempre a fumar, suspeita-se que isso seja só um pretexto para demoradas observações, exercícios de atenção de onde uma nova obra parece estar sempre a surgir.
Álvaro Siza, Prémio Pritzker, partilha agora os livros que mais o marcaram ao longo da sua vida. Desde edições fundamentais da obra de Alvar Aalto ou de Walther Gropius, à arquitectura moderna italiana menos conhecida, Brasil, história e filosofia críticas, um romance desconcertante, e poesia – bastante poesia – dos mestres portugueses, aos gregos e aos persas.
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The List #1 / Álvaro Siza
1
L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui 29 / Alvar Aalto
When at architecture school, Álvaro Siza’s teacher looked at his drawings and said: “It’s clear how little you know about architecture. Why don’t you go out and by some magazines?” In a time when it was hard to find them in Portugal, Siza bought some issues of Architecture d’Aujourd’hui and this on Aino and Alvar Aalto, was one of his first copies, of most decisive importance.
It’s easy to imagine the impact of seeing this work by a Finnish architect, who just in the first lines is described as working in a context where primeval and medieval world as still alive and intermingle with modern civilization. How this tension would reverberate in a young student from Portugal, of equal context of periphery and artisanship can only be evaluated in his own work. Works featuring this magazine, such as the Viipuri Library, are a clear point of departure of many Siza’s works.
In the middle of the magazine, a page places a part of Aalto’s furniture along with a photo of two undulated tree branches. The title – “la Recherche d’un Forme” – is perhaps one of the most intense allusions on the importance of a way of seeing, a particular attention towards reality, towards the evident, in order to archive new forms, in banality, in continuity, in steady observation as an exercise for life.
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Softcover, 31,2 x 24 cm, 84 pages
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L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui 28 / Walter Gropius
This one of Álvaro Siza’s first magazines on architecture when student, curiously an issue edited by the “young American architect” Paul Rudolph, later one of the most decisive American architects in the 20th century.
Entangled between a sterile historicism and the arrival of modern architects to America, this issue strives for depicting a clear vision of modern architecture. Here, it means to reset what architects’ training should be. From W. Gropius’ Harvard to the “Bauhaus of Chicago”, to “Black Mountain College”, the significance of a plan of studies for Architecture and Design was non less than the way of ensuring social recognition on the importance of Architecture in everyday live, and assuming a strategic role in the postwar crisis.
More or less a recurrent discussion, the very initial statement by the director of this magazine, André Bloc, would be of crucial importance nowadays – “it is a notable fact, that some of the architecture masters, could materialize their teachings with the one and only valid demonstration: building.”
Siza narrates a small episode that stands the importance of this issue: in one of his recent travels to Shanghai, he immediately recognized University of Hua-Tung, even if it was his first time there. The project of the campus is in this magazine. Drawings are brilliant in converging the oriental imaginary (pine trees, water, the use of ink in the paper, shadows) with the modern ideary for a university campus.
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Softcover, 31,2 x 24 cm, 120 pages
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O Problema da Casa Portuguesa / Fernando Távora
Fernando Távora (1923-2005) is a decisive figure to Portuguese contemporary architecture. Mentor of Álvaro Siza, he deeply influenced generations of architects with his erudition, vast knowledge of history, poetry and an idea of architecture as a whole, not merely of form and esthetics.
This book is in fact a small article, he published when he was 24 years old and in amidst of Portuguese dictatorship. In a time when Europe was already maturing the bases of Modern Architecture, in Portugal architecture was stuck in an impossible quest of an isolated, unique character of a so-called Portuguese style “spontaneous and naïve as a flower”, that would guarantee also a political detachment from the rest of the world.
“Everything has to be redone, starting from the beginning” he stated. Távora claimed an ethical idea of Tradition, that has nothing to do with decoration and picturesque, but a constant quest of human ideals trough the transformation of space, opening way for the work of architects like Siza to emerge.