Siza by Siza BOOK_texts&sketches_only

THE RICHES OF RESTRAINT Juhani Pallasmaa Architect, Professor (Helsinki) Álvaro Siza Vieira’s buildings emanate a feeling of the designer’s total dedication to the art of architecture. They are born of a passion for the poetic essence of building. ”There is only one way of thinking in cinema: poetically”, Andrey Tarkovsky writes in his literary legacy Sculpting in Time1.

Siza’s work reveals the same attitude in architecture. Although his buildings are aesthetically appealing and assured, one feels that there are other layers and meanings extending beyond aesthetic qualities into the existential and ethical sphere of life.

Siza’s architecture is personal and unique, but at the same time, it appears as if it were a self-evident result of an anonymous tradition, which gives his works a refreshing and liberating character. These buildings are not a result of a deliberate artistic aspiration, but rather a result of the way that things want to be. Siza does not seem to seek a personal artistic expression, yet his architecture is rich in soft-spoken meanings. Like the buildings of Alvar Aalto, his works arise from clarity of thought, but they end up in mystery. This is the mystery of poetic imagery which is endlessly open to new experiences. His images and spaces are sharply and clearly rendered, but there is a distinct feeling of undefinedness, vagueness and uncertainty, which leads to multiple interpretations. Uncertainty seems to have the same constitutive role for Álvaro Siza, the architect, as for Joseph Brodsky, the poet: ”Poetry is a tremendous school of insecurity and uncertainty”2. So is architecture, although today architects and their products usually aspire to appear assured, without any sign of hesitation.

Regardless of their precise visual rendering, Siza’s forms and surfaces turn into multi-sensory atmospheres. The spaces and surfaces embrace the viewer, instead of confronting him. The spaces and forms are experienced haptically, and they invite and address the hand and the skin as much as the eye. We are invited to touch the world through our entire being.

Indeed, they reveal ”how the world touches us”, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes the magic of Paul Cézanne’s paintings.3