Álvaro Siza: in/disciplina

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Álvaro Siza in/discipline, on show at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, from September 2019 through February 2020. This is the first retrospective of Siza’s work since, in 2014, his extensive archive was donated to three institutions: the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), in Montréal, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, in Lisbon, and the Serralves Foundation, the organizer of the show, in Porto. The exhibition traces Álvaro Siza's design process through the presentation of 30 projects, built and unbuilt, spanning more than six decades, from his first works – the Four Dwellings in Matosinhos or the Ocean Swimming Pool in Leça da Palmeira, Portugal – to recently completed work and projects under construction, including the Mimesis Museum in South Korea, the Church in Saint-Jacques-de-la-Lande (France) and the Residential Tower in New York. This publication does not reproduce the exhibition, rather it is intended to have a life of its own independent from the event that originated it. However, the publication has the same structure as the exhibition and the materials presented in it –many of them previously unpublished– are spread across four sections. The first [Works] gathers a small set of drawings from each of the thirty projects on show. The second [Traces] features a selection of photographs of Siza’s projects which were relevant for the diffusion of his work in specialized publications, while seeking to trace the evolution of architectural photography across six decades. The third section [Trajectories] presents materials that record some moments in Siza’s education (in the widest possible sense of the word), constantly nurtured by readings and travels. Travel sketches, including drawings of cities in which Siza had the chance to work (sometimes accompanied by a singular photograph of the architect taken in the city in question) are brought together with a series of books and publications that were especially meaningful to him. In the fourth and last section [Statements] fellow architects recall their first encounter with Siza’s oeuvre and weigh its relevance in their own work. The book reveals the salutary disquiet and in/discipline that informs Álvaro Siza’s creative method, construed in the cross-fertilization of knowledges, cultures, geographies, works and authors. Siza’s questioning of architecture throughout his trajectory has built on both what is inside and what is outside of this discipline. Nuno Grande, Carles Muro (eds.)