About Portugal that enchants Siza

Outside its historic center, Porto is an urban chaos similar to that of Calquera, a Galician city: dead-end streets, winding through unsettled terrain, untidy buildings created by rapid and unplanned growth. But walking to the city, of course, the oasis where you live, where the harmony of space allows you to breathe. Inside the labyrinth, the visual and auditory noise welcomes, opens the mind, the elements make sense. This is a sign that we can come across the work of the architect Álvaro Siza. This is what happens with the Bouça social housing. It is literally revolutionary architecture, part of the SAAL (Serviço de Apoio Ambulatorio Local) project, which will begin immediately after the revolution on April 25 to remodel the Marxist districts of the city. In these peripheral projects, Siza has a deep understanding of the needs of his time and his city, which he intends to serve as an artist. “Architecture is a service,” he said in an interview for the magazine jot down. “A service that becomes art for me”, engadia.

His strike had begun years before, still under Salazar’s authority. Subjected to a centralism that is not considered political, but with renewed aesthetic areas, the Faculty of Architecture in Porto, under the leadership of Fernando Távora, began to propose new urban solutions, which crystallized in the young Siza, familiar with the Portuguese tradition, but deeply marked by Walter Gropius ( Bauhaus) and above all the Finnish Pole Alvar Aalto. Since the sixties, his works have concentrated the will for change in a busy city, materially stagnant, but with a vision that pointed to renovations in the seventies. Victor Hugo’s idea of ​​architecture as the specter of the epoch was confirmed in his works.

To meet them, we have to go to neighboring Matosinhos, where everything leads to Siza. It is his hometown, where he began to experiment with the territory and whose inhabitants live subject to his feitization. This interaction ends with a mention of Siza’s work. Shop for starters at Casa de Chá da Boa Nova, a chameleon exercise where human space is camouflaged by the sheer cliffs of the Atlantic coast. Being so integrated, there is a “failure of dialogue with the contour” that the author himself eventually regretted and compensated for some Piscinas das Marés in Leça da Palmeira, one of the most outstanding works of contemporary architecture in the entire Peninsula. The walls simultaneously interrupt and follow the horizon, space or the whole. The stagnant smooth and heavenly water overlaps with the dark and turbulent sea. Liquids sublimate the contrasts of rocks and concrete, geometric and wild.

Siza does not impose itself on the landscape, a man intervenes in it consciously mixing traditional elements with Nordic architecture and rationalism. Thus, there are some universal buildings, which also function in Santiago (CGAC), in Berlin (Bonjour Tristesse), in Barcelona (Meteorological Center), in Lisbon (Pavillón da Expo)… but always defeated by their location. As architect Rem Koolhass theorized, baleiro spaces are as important or more important than how they are built. Eat or turn down the music. And there is the virtue of Siza, that rhythm and harmony that are pure architectural spaces, which turns everything related to the building into architecture: “If we ignore the home, architecture is unnecessary,” he would say.

With this premise that “it is not acceptable to associate beauty with elitism”, the architect also built the Casa Alves Costa, the Marco de Canaveses Church, the Faculty of Architecture of Porto and, above all, the Serralves Museum. Everything not north of Portugal. Works that were awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1992, and which are now assembled as a monumental complex without candidacy for UNESCO World Heritage status. All of them, very different expressions of art, but all with an unmistakable signature, made with the consciousness of those who understand or work as a social responsibility. At the end of the day, his thinking is still revolutionary: “Having a global idea is the most criminal goal that leads to action.” Its action is to improve the places in which we live.