Conversations with Nature
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Well, different experiences occur in different places. To work outside of our usual location, our country, our town, calls for an extra effort in order to understand the different problems that may arise, which are sometimes not so different from the usual ones. It’s an extra effort but also an extra stimulus. — Siza, Álvaro, “Fundação Iberê Camargo,” in Gallanti, Fabrizio (ed.), MCHAP: The Americas 1, New York/ Chicago: Actar/IITAC, 2016, p. 403.
Speaking with his pencil, thinking aloud and choosing his words in a very clear way — as he lifts his upturned cigarette at the table in his office, in the café or restaurant or sitting on a wall in the sun — is typical of Álvaro Siza Vieira. It is also characteristic of his work that he enters into confrontation with nature in an apparently elegant but challenging manner, without wanting to submit it to his will. Indomitable, unpredictable nature and its infinitely rich geographical conditions are sought out by him, just as he also searches with his pencil for the essence of the subject preoccupying him. He analyzes its complexity by sketching it and looks for the seeming randomness of what is revealed to him. It was Fernando Távora, for whom the then 23-year-old Siza was working, who involved him in the competition team for the Boa Nova Tea House Restaurant in Leça da Palmeira, for which Távora chose a rocky site by the ocean with a view towards the Boa Nova Chapel — which Siza would, later in life, select as the place to celebrate his wedding in. Siza devoted much of his time to this project and, during the course of several years, was put in charge of designing the final project. When Távora was working on both the project, which had been transformed from farmland into a public park with a tennis court, and the Quinta de Conceição swimming pool, it was again Siza who assumed responsibility for the pool’s design. The relative isolation that Portugal experienced during the Estado Novo dictatorship from 1926 to 1974 also meant — as Siza pointed out during our visit to the Quinta da Conceiçao — that the magazines and books published in other parts of the world hardly ever reached them. It was in this climate that Siza developed his own language, which is attributable only to him. For him it is nature, preferably untouched, in which he intervenes, to which he responds with “architecture” — by means of which a modification of the natural condition takes place. The design process of his first projects, near his birthplace, Matosinhos, has, therefore, to do with a quest involving a territory in transition or a conversation with nature that can be called the starting point of Siza’s own thinking. During his stay in Chicago — in connection with the presentation of the MCHAP in S. R. Crown Hall for the Fundação Iberê Camargo in Porto Alegre — Siza gave a workshop to students and young architects in which he spoke about his “mythical” relationship with South America. That his father Júlio Siza Vieira was born in Belém in the state of Pará in Brazil may be mentioned as an ingratiating fact, one that guaranteed the collaboration of the artist Iberê Camargo’s family. The site for the