Exhibition "Siza antes do Siza. Álvaro Siza L'Opera Prima" opened to the public January 11 and 12

Exhibition “Siza antes do Siza. Álvaro Siza L’Opera Prima”
With this exhibition, we focus on the first work of the Portuguese architect Álvaro Joaquim de Melo Siza Vieira. A project less important, or so it seems, compared to many that followed, for the fact that it was made by a young author. Despite that, we believe that it is possible to recognize all Siza’s personality characteristics in these houses.
One of the goals of this initiative is also to stimulate students to believe in their skills, their gifts, their sensibilities, to being receptive to the new tendencies without forgetting history – which, just like Siza’s work shows us, teach us about the fundamental constants of the architectural project.
Given the specify of the experience narrated by the exhibition, the goal is also to show the importance of having a guide, a mentor that encourages the young author, just like it happened to Siza: someone that allowed him to go further, while guiding him with confidence and kindness.
By preparing the contents of this exhibition, an effective dimension of Siza’s drawing stood out, which indicates that the young Portuguese architect – that was 21 years old then – as leaked his thoughts in paper sheets, whose size were adjusted to a table dimension. Maybe this is the reason that lies behind the draw details in real size, but not in big shaped panels, that can be appreciated today as the first steps of a practice that would evolve very fast.
Observing the drawings made for the four built houses in Matosinhos, it is clear that the central focus of each reflexion is man, its measure, proportions, gestures, by projecting the house, giving shape to spaces, conceiving furniture. Men becomes the unity measure, the start point, the plastic element present in space, surrounded by a lighting that touches it, but at the same time touches materials and surfaces, organizing rooms and housing locals according to its quotidian trajectory.
Siza reveals from this first moment an innate gift to work three-dimensionally and with transversal sections. The green spaces around the houses match with the interior space with an exact precision, connected through steps or ramps; the interiors are highlighted by the complexity of points of view in different levels, transforming itself in a stage for the everyday life.
The same happens with the light on the ceiling, placed with precision to highlight special passages of constructions, in steps of a stair or the meeting point between two surfaces.
Young Siza – according to his words, when his first project appeared in nr 896, April 2019 of Casabella magazine, that goes along with this exhibition –, that was stimulated by magazine readings, stories and lessons of his mentor and professor Fernando Távora, but, above all, he learned a lot through the daily visits to the construction site, interaction with the workers, that taught him the tricks of the practice, the fundaments of the good construction.
It is also for these reasons that the exhibition helps to show how much has change the architect’s profession since the 1950s until the present, in which the designers are obliged to live in an era of blind believe in the separation of different specializing ways, in a time in which the different options discussion with the workers in the construction site has become practically impossible.
This exhibition is, therefore, an invitation about the actual architect’s role and, at the same time, a trip to flavour slowly, with the same lightness that we discover in pen’s drawings of our Portuguese hero, extreme defender of the human nature in the architect’s work.

Massimo Curzi