Architect: Álvaro Siza

Notes on Architectural Education and Drawing

Notes on Architectural Education and Drawing

Rafael Sousa Santos

The speed of transformation that characterises our contemporality is largely motivated by the development of the newest information technologies. The speed introduced by computation seems to be the promoter of the instability that reaches the conceptions of almost all professional and disciplinary fields since it imposes a pace of change… Read More

Malagueira: Conflict Resolution (1983)

Malagueira: Conflict Resolution (1983)

Álvaro Siza

From my experience at Évora, I believe that participation – neither mystifying nor mystified – implies numerous and inevitable conflicts, conflicts which come out of the project. The general concept for the Malagueira district, the methods, the project itself, have indeed given rise to contradictory commentaries, even before our intervention:… Read More

Dating Siza: The Malagueira ‘Cupula’

Dating Siza: The Malagueira ‘Cupula’

Manuel Montenegro

The unbuilt half-dome (referred to by the architect as the ‘cupula’) at the Quinta da Malagueira is the subject of a protracted design process that has lasted for over four decades. At the start of 2020, Álvaro Siza sent a drawing of the half-dome to Drawing Matter accompanied by letter… Read More

Siza at sixteen

Siza at sixteen

Manuel Montenegro and Álvaro Siza

Pouco a pouco, quase sem dar por isso, o carvão começou a não partir, o papel a não manchar, o miolo de pão a manter a plasticidade, o fôlego a aumentar. E a confiança. Slowly but steadily, unwittingly, the lead began to not break, paper to not stain, the bread… Read More

The Real and Imagined Worlds of Álvaro Siza

The Real and Imagined Worlds of Álvaro Siza

Bruno Silvestre

Inside the cover of Álvaro Siza’s sketchbooks, there is a whole world: the real and the imagined. In his personal registers of the real, Siza accepts the world as it is. He uses drawing in a playful but productive way, learns when he apprehends, absorbs when drawing. This process of… Read More

Álvaro Siza: Drawn Closer

Álvaro Siza: Drawn Closer

Álvaro Siza

This text was originally published in Architecture through Drawing. Drawn Closer is a year-long collaboration between Domus and Drawing Matter, edited by Sarah Handelman. Each issue of the magazine features one architect discussing a drawing which they recognise as a transformative moment in their work. Domus 2020 is guest-edited by David Chipperfield. I began using… Read More

Houses of Work and Play

Houses of Work and Play

Patrick Lynch

The Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto (FAUP), designed by Álvaro Siza, is set on a hillside, close to a road bridge at the mouth of the river Douro. The bridge seems to be part of the extended composition of the campus; the school-city a gateway to the… Read More

Espelho Álvaro

Espelho Álvaro

Mário Botta

This mirror was among the objects, sketches and photographs at his great exhibition at Padiglione di Arte Contemporanea. Siza was in a corner of the hall with some friends. More than a thousand guests from the Milano-bene (well-to-do Milanese) had come for a vernissage with fur coats, television spotlights, beautiful women, men… Read More

The Difficulty of Designing Furniture

The Difficulty of Designing Furniture

Álvaro Siza

I Architecture: a tree here, a house there, or a temple; on the right a hill, or plain, sea, river; a bridge, regular outline of this street, the irregularity of another; colour, rhythms, climate, this client; yellowing photograph, parchment, power, marginality.Not as a matrix. Provocation, hence vocation to distort, to… Read More

Alternative Histories: NoAarchitecten on Álvaro Siza

Alternative Histories: NoAarchitecten on Álvaro Siza

When we look at Siza’s drawing we try to forget the project we know. We see the beautiful irregularity of a pencil perimeter, defined by obstacles of all sorts. Within it, the architect added straight lines, an attempt to bring order and create a place to dwell, to find shelter.… Read More

Alternative Histories: Murmuur Architecten on Álvaro Siza

Alternative Histories: Murmuur Architecten on Álvaro Siza

We appreciate Siza’s gesture to connect the balustrades to a kind of coat rack or washing wire in front of the windows on the first floor. The panache of the pencil stripe on the sketch is brought to life in the fine red line of the balustrade. He strings the… Read More

Mystery as Ground

Mystery as Ground

Andrew Clancy

I We could start here, with this image in the exhibition Disappear Here, found in Abraham Bosse’s (c. 1602–1676) Maniere universelle de M. Desargues pour pratiquer la perspective. Two men stand looking at a four-sided form projected on the ground. Rather than an orthogonal, universal perspective that privileges one point outside the picture,… Read More