ALVARO SIZA

Portuguese architect and architectural educator born on 25 June 1933.

He graduated in architecture in 1955, at the former School of Fine Arts of the University of Porto.

His first work was done in 1954 even before his graduation and taught in Porto school of architecture from 1966 to 1969.

He was awarded the Pritzher prize in 1992 at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago, USA. 

He is also recognized by his academic work and For his contributions on publications from Luis Barragán.

His first designs to get more attention where public pools in Portugal. Most of his well known works are located in his home town Porto.

 SPORT FACILITIES RIBERA-SERRALLO

Swimming pool Leça da Palmeira

He developed several well known public housing and urban projects in several Portuguese cities, as well as the museum for contemporary art and the faculty of Porto. 

Malagueira housing project

His language is more distinguishable by the use of more lines than perfect forms, it interests him the fragmentation as reaction to the complexity of a program,

Siza’s thought is not linear, absolute and definitive. The solution can be found in the syllogistic duality between what remains constant and what is presented as innovation. Both the premises value the existence and the absence of “belonging”, keeping in mind the tremendous context of: the location, the program, the material, the morpho-typological values of other works, the expression of color and curve, et cetera.

 In 1977, following the revolution in Portugal, the city government of Evora commissioned Siza to plan a housing project in the rural outskirts of the town. It was to be one of several that he would do for the national housing association(SAAL), consisting of 1,200 low-cost, housing units, some one-story and some two-story row houses, all with courtyards. 

SAAL Bouça Housing

Bouça and São Victor were low cost projects designed for the SAAL organization in Porto.

 The project demonstrate a design process for building in dense urban conditions that Siza characterizes as “forming a whole with ruins”.

 Sparse cubic forms is used to develop the geometry and repetitive order typical to most housing designs while at the same time achieving a high degree of architectural variety.

Alvaro Siza's style and approach to modern design by returning to original sources has made him one of the most important representatives of critical regionalism in architecture.His works were often defined as poetic modernism.

RECEDINTAL BUILDING IN BERLIN

RECEDINTAL BUILDING IN BERLIN

This social residential building was Siza's first project to be built outside Portugal. 

 As many other spaces in the city, this space became empty after the war and an urban intervention that would integrate the remaining buildings with this corner lot was necessary.

Alvaro Siza's urban approach is a conscious intervention that reflects not the happiest part of urban living but reminds and accentuates the melancholy of the area.. 

The curved facade is a slight gesture that softens the massiveness of the concrete and small uniform windows. 

Each floor does feel cramped, still the curved corner helps ease the space in each floor.

 The layout had to include commercial spaces in the ground level and fit 46 apartment units in 7 floors

Santa Maria Church

The Church for Marco of Canaveses, is only a part of a religious complex that foresees an auditorium, the catechesis school and the house for the parish priest.

The façade is in three sections with two projecting towers.

In the space around the altar a series of elements that participate in the ritual exist: the pulpit, the own altar, the tabernacle, the chairs of the celebrants and the cross, the ones which slowly took form and they defined the space later, in the respect for the movements, pré-established, of the mass.

 Public Library Viana do Castelo

Boa Nova Tea House

Mayor Wine Cellar

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