Étude d'une oeuvre d'Alvaro Siza (document en espagnol)

Álvaro Siza Vieira is the greatest living Portuguese architect - perhaps the finest the country has ever produced - whose works over the years have proven to be amongst the most coherent and complete of all architectural works this century. This coherence is not based on stylistic repetition: it lies in the progressive evolution of the act of designing and, as such, Siza’s work is immediately recognisable wherever it be found.

The architect has frequently been linked to Minimalism, as if he were in fact a Minimalist architect. If the subliminal structure of his work is in keeping with a particular movement, however, then I believe that movement to be Expressionism: expressionist roots are revealed at a deeper level in the formal structures of all his works: more immediately patent in the forms of the Boa Nova Tea House, more elaborate and subterranean in theSetubal College or the Santiago Museum, expressionist reflection is perhaps a common thread that runs throughout his work.

The quality of light and the way in which it is manipulated is another. The markedly plastic tactile light - not passive light, in the sense that it provides a service (the light that illuminates the "simple volumes" of a Le Corbusier) but light dealt with as an expressive object - remains, perhaps, the very stuff of architecture. And in Siza it is conceived as being rooted in expressionism. Perhaps the Chiado experience, the contact with windows and the thickness of the walls, will result in a certain hardening of light - not a loss of quality, but rather an alteration to this quality.

Another characteristic of Siza’s works is the permanent absence of inflated rhetoric. One of the reasons for this - there are others - is the scale he always introduces, regardless of the size of the project. It is interesting to note how there has always been an attempt to incorporate a German influence into Portuguese architecture. It seems to me that the Austrian influence is far greater than the German, and that control of scale is one of the aspects of this influence. In Siza’s case the influence is a recollection that has been absorbed in refined style, but it is present nonetheless. This precision of scale is contributed to by the subtle understanding of the surroundings, and the recent project for the Faculty of Architecture in Oporto, in which he rejects a large-scale solution, is a fine example of this.

Siza himself says: "What I appreciate and look for most in architecture is clarity and simplism. Simplicity and simplism are known to be opposites, just as unity and diversity are not. Simplicity results from the control of complexity and the contradictions of any programme [...] Complexity and internal contradictions - external, also, when a new structure is confronted with what preceeded and what surrounds it, taking on a not necessarily predictable destiny. For this reason, the more character a building has and the clearer its form, the more flexible its vocation."

...