from The List Álvaro Siza / Rare

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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 20^th 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.

Softcover, 31,2 x 24 cm, 120 pages

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