It's unlikely that the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza will ever enjoy the fame of, say, a Rem Koolhaas or a Frank Gehry, architects who have vaulted to international attention by demolishing accepted orthodoxies.
For one thing Siza rarely builds outside Europe, while his celebrity counterparts shuttle around the globe.
He has spent his career quietly working on the fringes of the international architecture scene. He dislikes long plane flights, mostly because of a decades-long smoking habit and recent back problems. And he still seems most at ease in Porto, Portugal, his native city, where he can often be found sketching in a local café with a pack of cigarettes within easy reach.
Yet over the last five decades Siza, now 74, has steadily assembled a body of work that ranks him among the greatest architects of his generation, and his creative voice has never seemed more relevant than now.
His reputation is likely to receive a boost from his museum here for the Iberê Camargo Foundation, his most sculptural work to date. Its curvaceous bleached white exterior, nestled against a lush Brazilian hillside, has a vibrant sensuality that contrasts with the corporate sterility of so many museums today.
Yet to understand Siza's thinking fully, you must travel back to his earlier buildings. Set mostly within a few hours drive of Porto, an aging industrial hub in northern Portugal, they include a range of relatively modest projects, from public housing to churches to private houses, that tap into local traditions and the wider arc of Modernist history. The best of them are striking for a rare spirit of introspection. Their crisp forms and precise lines are contemporary yet atavistic in spirit. The surfaces retain the memory of the laborer's hands; the walls exude a sense of gravity.
For one thing Siza rarely builds outside Europe, while his celebrity counterparts shuttle around the globe.
He has spent his career quietly working on the fringes of the international architecture scene. He dislikes long plane flights, mostly because of a decades-long smoking habit and recent back problems. And he still seems most at ease in Porto, Portugal, his native city, where he can often be found sketching in a local café with a pack of cigarettes within easy reach.
Yet over the last five decades Siza, now 74, has steadily assembled a body of work that ranks him among the greatest architects of his generation, and his creative voice has never seemed more relevant than now.
His reputation is likely to receive a boost from his museum here for the Iberê Camargo Foundation, his most sculptural work to date. Its curvaceous bleached white exterior, nestled against a lush Brazilian hillside, has a vibrant sensuality that contrasts with the corporate sterility of so many museums today.
Yet to understand Siza's thinking fully, you must travel back to his earlier buildings. Set mostly within a few hours drive of Porto, an aging industrial hub in northern Portugal, they include a range of relatively modest projects, from public housing to churches to private houses, that tap into local traditions and the wider arc of Modernist history. The best of them are striking for a rare spirit of introspection. Their crisp forms and precise lines are contemporary yet atavistic in spirit. The surfaces retain the memory of the laborer's hands; the walls exude a sense of gravity.
His apparent reluctance to stray too far away from home is not simply a question of temperament. It is rooted in deeply felt beliefs about architecture's cultural role. In a profession that remains stubbornly divided between nostalgia for a saccharine nonexistent past and a blind faith in the new global economy, he neither rejects history nor ignores contemporary truths. Instead, his architecture encapsulates a society in a fragile state of evolution, one in which the threads that bind us need to be carefully preserved.
Nicolai Ouroussoff, IHT
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