Born in 1933, Álvaro Siza is internationally one of the best known architects of our day. Regarded as a pioneer and the most important representative of contemporary Portuguese architecture, he has received the highest awards of the profession: the Pritz-ker Prize, 1992, the Praemium Imperiale, 1998, and the Golden Lion of the Biennale in Venice, 2012, for lifetime achievement. Álvaro Siza was interviewed by Frank Kaltenbach on 18 June 2014 on the Vitra campus in Weil am Rhein.
It’s not easy to get back into one’s earlier designs again, says Álvaro Siza, regardin the retrospect of his own work. For example the Boa Nova Teahouse, dating from 1963, stood empty for many years and became increasingly dilapidated as a result of vandalism. Today, it’s a listed building, however, and the Casa da Arquitectura of Siza's home town, Matosinhos, took it in hand and contacted him with a view to restoring it. With structures of that kind, though, it's nit possible to only alter a detail without affecting the overall composition.
Although the architectural working process is additionned by computer models and animation, the sketch is still considered essential for the progress of the design at Álvaro Siza's practice: »The sketch is much more immediate and is less binding. A computer rendering always looks so final, and there’s a danger of not thinking things out fully. We prefer to work with models, sometimes large-scale ones that I can stick my head into. In the case of the church in Marco de Canaveses, this allowed me to check the long wall that is vertical at floor level, but which curves inwards more and more towards the top«, states Siza in the interview.
It’s not easy to get back into one’s earlier designs again, says Álvaro Siza, regardin the retrospect of his own work. For example the Boa Nova Teahouse, dating from 1963, stood empty for many years and became increasingly dilapidated as a result of vandalism. Today, it’s a listed building, however, and the Casa da Arquitectura of Siza's home town, Matosinhos, took it in hand and contacted him with a view to restoring it. With structures of that kind, though, it's nit possible to only alter a detail without affecting the overall composition.
Although the architectural working process is additionned by computer models and animation, the sketch is still considered essential for the progress of the design at Álvaro Siza's practice: »The sketch is much more immediate and is less binding. A computer rendering always looks so final, and there’s a danger of not thinking things out fully. We prefer to work with models, sometimes large-scale ones that I can stick my head into. In the case of the church in Marco de Canaveses, this allowed me to check the long wall that is vertical at floor level, but which curves inwards more and more towards the top«, states Siza in the interview.