Alvaro Siza: intensity through dialogue

[lllARKlll]

http-~~-//www.bdonline.co.uk/Pictures/468xAny/l/s/v/Ibere_Camargo_WEB.jpg

Alvaro Siza: intensity through dialogue

26 February, 2009

By Ellis Woodman

Alvaro Siza, who will receive the Royal Gold Medal at RIBA tonight, talks to Ellis Woodman about his influences

EW: When you began working in the 1950s, the architectural discourse was focused on the problem of housing and, by extension, on the problem of the city. Today, the discussion is focused much more on the individual building and its capacity to perform a representational function. How do you view that shift — as a liberation or as a source of frustration?

Alvaro Siza: We need different experiences in the city. To make public buildings, it is necessary to have an experience of the small-scale pattern. There is a relationship between the background texture and the large buildings which emerge from it.
In the 1980s, I reached a point in my career when I began to look for a possibility of working at both scales. For many years, my work was private houses or social housing, and I was classified as that kind of architect. It was becoming unhealthy, and I had to enter competitions to escape it.

EW: I understand you no longer enter competitions.

Alvaro Siza: In the beginning I won some, but I began to feel they were very difficult to win, and there was a risk that the short preparation time meant the design became a little schematic.
Also, it is not compatible with my studio organisation. If you want to do competitions, it is really necessary to have a second studio. You cannot mix a project that is developed intensively with the day-to-day rhythm of an office.
Today, in the work I accept there is a balance between public buildings, housing and private houses. At the moment I am working on two private houses which provide a field for experimentation. There is not so much bureaucracy, and there is a dialogue with the client that can be difficult but is very good for the intensity of the architecture. And the houses do inform the larger projects.
In the history of modern architecture, the influence that houses have had is clear. New concepts of space and new architectural elements often emerge first in the design of houses. We can almost make a history of modern architecture only with houses.

EW: The history of modernism clearly remains a strong reference point for your work. Could you describe the relationship you see between your buildings and those of the early modernists?

Alvaro Siza: When I began in school, Le Corbusier was the hero. Then came the Brazilians — who had a particular influence in Portugal for obvious reasons — as well as Alvar Aalto, the Swedes and architects in England who were dealing with schools and housing. We travelled and studied the moderns, but also the architecture of Greece and Egypt.
It is the education of an architect: to see, to see, to see. But what we kept was not an invitation to copy. If you copy Le Corbusier or Frank Lloyd Wright, the result is a disaster — a person who does not have the personality or the education of Le Corbusier cannot copy the forms.
But the material is absorbed deeply, and it comes to help us. And one becomes aware of the relationships between the authors. Alvar Aalto was influenced by the south — by Morocco, Spain and Portugal — and the south was influenced by the great architects of Sweden and Finland.
I recently saw a photograph of Aalto in his house in Helsinki and on the table was a book on the vernacular architecture of Portugal which was published in the sixties and which was very influential.

EW: Do you find you are also influenced by the work of the younger generation?

Alvaro Siza: By Souto de Moura, certainly. He worked with me for a number of years, but from the beginning I could see he was an author. I told him he must leave the office but we have collaborated together since, and in Naples we are currently making a metro station together.
In the work of the new generation we can see a preoccupation with combining different materials — with discontinuity. This is perhaps a return to a consideration of neoplastic composition. A few years ago, I did begin to feel that I was maybe too obsessed with continuity. Perhaps it comes from using models, which are a fantastic instrument, but which can also be dangerous.
When I analyse the things that I have done, the basis of it is continuity. It is the same material which develops the volumes, and this becomes at some point too easy. One thing we have to do is escape the easy. We have big examples like Picasso: he was always escaping from becoming too skilled.

http-~~-//www.bdonline.co.uk/Pictures/web/a/v/o/Expo_pavilion_WEB.jpgCredit: Fernando Guerra

Portuguese Pavilion, Expo 98, Lisbon, Portugal, 1997-98

Fonte: BDonline