Fot.: John Pawson

The Invisible Detail:
Three Encounters with Álvaro Siza

by Inmaculada Maluenda and Enrique Encabo

Text published in El Croquis 215/216 Álvaro Siza 2015 2022 

Álvaro Siza Vieira has just turned 89 years old. Born in 1933 in the port town of Matosinhos, he has stretched the calendar at both ends. As well as being extraordinarily precocious &mdash long before finishing his studies, at the age of 21, he had already tackled a few small commissions &mdash he has also achieved a rare longevity. Siza has been building over eight different decades, and in all of them he has made an important mark: from the Boa Nova restaurant and the swimming pools in Leça da Palmeira in the 1950s and ‘60s, to the social housing in Portugal and northern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, the church in Marco de Canaveses in the 1990s, the 'Brazilian' Iberê Camargo Foundation in the 2000s, his Asian works in the 2010s and even a tower block in Manhattan in the 2020s.

An alternative list of Siza's works could always be made with pieces of equivalent, if not greater value. We might not have included, for example, his bank branches, the functionalist acropolis of the Faculty of Architecture in Porto, or the stone canopy of the Portuguese Pavilion at the Lisbon World Exposition in 1998. Although Siza often complains about the way the profession works in his country, it must be said that he has not done badly at all. The Boa Nova, the swimming pools and the Lisbon pavilion have been declared national heritage and the architect himself has been responsible for renovating them. And up to ten of his works can be found in the vicinity of his studio. He even seems to arouse people's sympathy, which is rare for an architect of his stature. In 2005, he received the keys of Porto, his city.

Nor does he seem to have moderated his traditionally intense workflow. Such daily hustle and bustle makes any attempt to establish a quiet conversation difficult, so Siza prefers to attend to interviews at weekends. For all these reasons, we decided from the outset to break the chat down into different phases, and to make successive visits to his studio between January and May 2022. What follows, therefore, is a composition of these parts, with occasional interventions from other voices, such as his collaborator Carlos Castanheira, with whom Siza shares several works in the East Asia and Portugal, or his old friend and regular partner Eduardo Souto de Moura.

Although there was a questionnaire prepared, the first meeting was not even planned as an interview. We accompanied the El Croquis team in a preliminary meeting to review the works created and the projects of the last few years so we could decide on the final content of this monograph. Siza arrived slightly late, and could not resist a joking comment when he saw Fernando Márquez Cecilia: "Half your face covered with a mask and the other half with a beard? No-one will recognize you!" After taking a seat and removing his scarf, he looked carefully at the printed summary: "All that's finished. What a time it's been!"3 With slight dissatisfaction, he asked his secretary, Anabela Monteiro, for a complete list of the office's output for the past 15 years, which he went through in detail, peppering his reading with little darts of fatalistic humor about all the projects that had not come to fruition: "And I was so happy. Now I'm going to get depressed..."

Siza's Spanish is better than good, sprinkled with a few Portuguese words that are easy to understand in the context of the conversation. Two hours later, the accounts recorded 48 projects frustrated due to lack of political will, bad luck, or the laziness of the developers: "There has never been so much talk about architecture in Portugal as there is now, always in a tone that implies that it's all very good. But behind it there is an absolute disaster in the cities. You only have to walk around Porto and see what has been done."

I. Maluenda /E. Encabo: Was the situation of architecture in Portugal very different when you started in the mid-1950s?

A. Siza: Very different; sometimes better and sometimes worse. At that time, engineers did almost everything and architects had very little work in Portugal. They could only be in charge of public works that served as propaganda for the regime, very much conditioned by that terrible idea of a 'national architecture'. There was very little income, but the cost of maintaining an office was also very low, so young people could have a workspace when they graduated. The builders were good: they were skilled, and construction used traditional methods. Now, however, the costs involved in keeping a studio open are very high...

IM/EE: You always have a piece of paper at hand. Are you still surprised at what your hand produces?

AS: I like to draw. There's so much boring stuff in architecture that for me it is an escape &mdash a beautiful and very fast way of working. A sketch &mdash a boceto &mdash takes just a few seconds. In that phase when you're speculating with the idea &mdash things can be worked out in a very short time. Computers are not yet able to do that. But a drawing on its own can be dangerous: very misleading.

IM/EE: Do you still get disappointed?

AS: I certainly do! Sometimes, when I pass my drawings to a collaborator and then see the result to scale, strictly mapped with the computer, it's a disaster. Something similar happens with models. I usually make them, at least at the beginning of a project, without any base, so I can look at the interior space from below, or from partial fragments. These are complementary ways of working.

IM/EE: Do you remember when and how your interest in drawing came about?

AS: My family had no contact with architecture, although my father was an engineer and liked art. But I learned on my own. At school &mdash in primary school &mdash we had drawing classes. I remember that what we were asked to do, maybe when I was five years old, was to draw a picture of a closed box and an open box, which my mother also taught me to do. Later, when I was six or seven, it was one of my uncles who encouraged me. The first thing he taught me to do was a horse, and then cowboys... He didn't draw anything &mdash he was terrible &mdash but he was a great teacher. He put across to me the pleasure of drawing, which stayed with me for the rest of my life.

Matosinhos was then a very small place, where contacts were mainly between people living there. When they saw my interest in drawing, some people started giving me books for Christmas. In general, everyone &mdash friends, my father, mother, grandmother and others &mdash brought me art books, most of them with small and very poor quality black and white reproductions. Collection des Maîtres, it was called. I remember one about Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rubens... and so on until you got to Picasso, the most modern thing there was. I still have them &mdash they're small books. I also remember that, later on, when I traveled with my family in Spain &mdash where we almost always spent our holidays &mdash what my father liked the most when he arrived at a place was to go to the market. He said that in a market you could breathe the spirit of a city. Then we'd go to the museums.