ÁLVARO SIZA VIEIRA
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Ă lvaro Siza Vieira in Conversation with Kenneth Frampton Photographs by Vincent Mentzel
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Conversations with Nature
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Well, different experiences occur in different places. To work outside of our usual location, our country, our town, calls for an extra effort in order to understand the different problems that may arise, which are sometimes not so different from the usual ones. It’s an extra effort but also an extra stimulus. — Siza, Álvaro, “Fundação Iberê Camargo,” in Gallanti, Fabrizio (ed.), MCHAP: The Americas 1, New York/ Chicago: Actar/IITAC, 2016, p. 403.
Speaking with his pencil, thinking aloud and choosing his words in a very clear way — as he lifts his upturned cigarette at the table in his office, in the café or restaurant or sitting on a wall in the sun — is typical of Álvaro Siza Vieira. It is also characteristic of his work that he enters into confrontation with nature in an apparently elegant but challenging manner, without wanting to submit it to his will. Indomitable, unpredictable nature and its infinitely rich geographical conditions are sought out by him, just as he also searches with his pencil for the essence of the subject preoccupying him. He analyzes its complexity by sketching it and looks for the seeming randomness of what is revealed to him. It was Fernando Távora, for whom the then 23-year-old Siza was working, who involved him in the competition team for the Boa Nova Tea House Restaurant in Leça da Palmeira, for which Távora chose a rocky site by the ocean with a view towards the Boa Nova Chapel — which Siza would, later in life, select as the place to celebrate his wedding in. Siza devoted much of his time to this project and, during the course of several years, was put in charge of designing the final project. When Távora was working on both the project, which had been transformed from farmland into a public park with a tennis court, and the Quinta de Conceição swimming pool, it was again Siza who assumed responsibility for the pool’s design. The relative isolation that Portugal experienced during the Estado Novo dictatorship from 1926 to 1974 also meant — as Siza pointed out during our visit to the Quinta da Conceiçao — that the magazines and books published in other parts of the world hardly ever reached them. It was in this climate that Siza developed his own language, which is attributable only to him. For him it is nature, preferably untouched, in which he intervenes, to which he responds with “architecture” — by means of which a modification of the natural condition takes place. The design process of his first projects, near his birthplace, Matosinhos, has, therefore, to do with a quest involving a territory in transition or a conversation with nature that can be called the starting point of Siza’s own thinking. During his stay in Chicago — in connection with the presentation of the MCHAP in S. R. Crown Hall for the Fundação Iberê Camargo in Porto Alegre — Siza gave a workshop to students and young architects in which he spoke about his “mythical” relationship with South America. That his father Júlio Siza Vieira was born in Belém in the state of Pará in Brazil may be mentioned as an ingratiating fact, one that guaranteed the collaboration of the artist Iberê Camargo’s family. The site for the
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museum was created by Siza, who more or less replaced a portion of the cliff with the building, thus allowing the traffic to flow along the shore. The control of the circulation space — offering an in-between space outside the building created by covered ramps, as well as fluidity in the interior — creates a unique environment for the arts. The Leça da Palmeira swimming pool in the sea, or, to be more precise, in the Atlantic Ocean — which at 26 years of age Siza worked with the engineer Bernardo Ferrão to create — is a tidal pool, where calm water meets the rough water of the ocean. It is a masterpiece that summarizes his thesis; it is part of his own history, of the roughness that belongs to the territory he formed part of, though it is also marginal and modest — unexpected. He takes bathers through the low, darkened changing rooms made of dark, painted timber out into the seeming paradise of the beach and blue water. Following which, the body is exposed to the burning sun, the salty water of the ocean, and the abrasive rocks, where the seawater reveals its indomitable strength. That is what Vincent Mentzel captures in his photographic narrative, in which he follows the author closely, in this publication, made on the occasion of the MCHAP. The unparalleled way Álvaro Siza Vieira defies the complexity of scale in his work, wherein man is part of nature and his own architecture, is self-evident. Moreover, the way in which he responds to the dialectic of his artificial intervention, together with the untouched savagery of unpredictable nature, shows how he defies destiny and is able to let go of his work, allowing it, seemingly, the freedom to be part of nature. After more than half a century the Leça da Palmeira swimming pool in the sea is still an iconic work in which changes over time, the scars that are silent witnesses of what the body has experienced, are characteristic of the timeless power of his oeuvre, of his complex architectural landscape. Wiel Arets
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Ă lvaro Siza Vieira in two characteristic poses at the beginning of the interview
The visiting MCHAP delegation — namely Wiel Arets, dean of the IIT department of architecture, Vedran Mimica, associate dean of the school and professor of architecture, the distinguished Dutch architectural photographer, Vincent Mentzel, and Kenneth Frampton — arrive at the appointed hour, before a stone wall which seems to have been there since time immemorial. The door clicks open and we are admitted, as if by an invisible hand, and we duly ascend a narrow flight of steps, enclosed on both sides but without a handrail, before we arrive to the top of a stone podium from which a three-story office building impassively arises before us. Up to Fernando Távora’s untimely death, this structure had been occupied by three successive generations of Portuguese architects; Távora himself, plus Álvaro Siza Vieira and Eduardo Souto de Moura; these last two practices continuing to occupy the available space today. There unfolds to one side of the podium/forecourt a sensuously interwoven micro-landscape of exotic plants laid in place by the landscape architect João Gomes da Silva, who collaborated with Siza on the design of the landscape of Siza’s Malagueira housing scheme, built outside Évora from the mid70s. After a short pause Siza greets us in the half light of the entrance hall and we proceed to his office, where we are mutually received by his assistant and longtime associate Clemente Menéres Semide. Otherwise, since this is a Saturday, the office is virtually deserted. Amid cigarette smoke, largely emanating from Siza himself, we promptly enter into the interview, whereupon we rapidly pass from one topic to another, coming back repeatedly to the role that drawing has played in the evolution of Siza’s architecture. Eventually, we touch on the residential high-rise building that Siza is currently designing for Manhattan, at the behest of a young Indian developer, Amit Khurana; a building destined to be clad in stone and fitted out with steel windows, which will be respectively quarried and fabricated in Portugal.
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Ă lvaro Siza Vieira making a point on the plan of the Malagueira Housing
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ABOUT APHORISMS AND REALITY KF
Somehow all this reminds me of something else I like about your writing, because you are very good at aphorisms. And I remember one that I think should be put over the entrance of every architecture school: “Architects don’t invent anything, they transform reality.” I think it’s such a telling observation. And it brings up the question of what is real?
ÁS When we spoke about method, I talked about making a lot of sketches to start with, often somewhat crazy ones. Now, if we speak about reality there are many, many interpretations or ways of looking at or capturing what it is exactly. And the reason I make many sketches is precisely this effort of trying to capture something more than the immediately evident, because the immediately evident is rather poor in the end; it’s too obvious and limiting.
ABOUT THE BODY KF
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The first time I had a sauna was in the small prefabricated house of Kristian Gullichsen, and I remember thinking that I hardly knew these people, yet everyone was taking their clothes off, also with the help of a little alcohol. So, step by step, everybody became naked, and we’re also a little drunk, right? And that’s in my memory, anyway. This actually reminds me of something else, of when you say this beautiful thing about the body. I wrote here that the idea of existence and the body is very important in your drawings. And you say somewhere that one’s body doesn’t end with one’s body, but rather extends into the body of others. You make a point about an unavoidable collectivity in this way, though you don’t use this word. But I love this idea that the body and the mind don’t end with the individual, but go on into another body and mind. You say something like that.
ÁS Well, the body is the reference, the measure for us, for architects. When we make a stair we have to adapt it so that it’s comfortable, we have to measure how high it is, and so on. When we make a room it’s the same. Not only the furniture but also how we move. And then there’s the relationship between the different spaces. So in fact the body commands everything in architecture. The proportions, too, and it’s Leonardo da Vinci who makes that famous drawing of the proportions. Another thing about the body someone told me about to do with the design of now, I don’t know which project, is that it seemed like a face. And then I thought about it and I remembered that in many Palladian buildings you look and you see a face complete with eyes and nose and mouth, and so on. So, I’m sure we are entirely impressed by this continuous presence of the body, of our bodies and other bodies, and that everything begins with use, with bodily needs, with how we use a house or a chair, that everything is in fact commanded by the body.
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Leรงa da Palmeira. ร lvaro Siza Vieira with Wiel Arets
Our next stop is the Leça da Palmeira pool that Siza designed in 1961 for a coastal site near Matosinhos. It happens to be thirty years since I first visited this work, when this audacious swimming facility set in the midst of a rocky coastline and against the constant roar of a turbulent sea had happened in the 60s as the only intervention in a continuous wasteland, covered with scrubgrass and extending, as far as the eye could see, from the lighthouse of Boa Nova to the immobile cranes of the harbor in Matosinhos. In the interim this wasteland has been transformed into the parody of a manmade Riviera of luxurious mid-rise apartment blocks, elevated upon a berm above the autoroute and attended by lush vegetation. The erstwhile affinity between the mono-pitched, copper-clad timber changing facility and the autoroute is still in evidence but now the overall context is entirely different. Although it is still a mutual gray-green, rain-soaked shed and an attendant pool, the whole has somehow now become permanently transformed by a nouveau riche residential backdrop. Since it was a Sunday in early July, as opposed to a weekday in winter, as per my previous visit, when I first came without the architect, the entire facility was now covered by people lying on the rocks like a convocation of sun-worshiping bewitched lizards, occasionally plunging into their appointed pools, as these had first been integrated by the architect into a hostile coastline; with the children grouped around their organic grotto of a pool and the adults braving a plunge into a concrete bunker of a pool with its leading edges lapped by the ferocity of the sea. What surprised me most of all, since I had never been poolside before, was the monumental character of the rock-encrusted terrain within which these concrete earthworks had been sunk, with small sandy beaches extending for some distance to either side. Meanwhile, the unremitting roar of the sea was acoustically muted within the blackened, all but subterranean interior of the labyrinthine changing facilities, into which, then as now, one had to descend from the road in order to enter eventually into the domain of the pool. In doing so, then as now, one not only lost all sight of the sea, but also momentarily found the sound of the waves muffled. It was still there, within the cool half-light of the changing rooms, dividing left and right according to one’s gender, while the timber structure itself was as black as the pitch which had been duly applied from time to time to what we learnt from Siza was recycled wood from Riga. It seems that in the 19th century Portugal was in the habit of importing, so that in this instance the changing facilities had been built of recycled wood taken from a demolished Portuguese house which had been originally framed with timber from Riga.
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Leça da Palmeira. View of changing facilities, perimeter wall and cafÊ
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Leรงa da Palmeira. Changing and bathing facilities
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à lvaro Siza Vieira on the site of Leça da Palmeira
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Leรงa da Palmeira. Perimeter wall and bathing facilities
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A POOL IN THE SEA