- Souto de Moura. "I like small crimes"
- Granada.Siza in the Alhambra
In a stubborn and secretly proud manner, Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura deny the status of star architects that one would be tempted to award them. If his scant-heartedness - his admirable modesty - blocks the spills of egotism to which successful architects are so given, his ironic modesty - the modesty, perhaps, of those born in peripheral cities like Porto - makes them immune to mirages of globalization. They are virtues that show up even in their attire of normal people , so oblivious to casual sophistication or snobbish attunement that designers often emblazon.
They do not give the type of star architects , it is true, but both Siza and Souto - two of the most celebrated pritzkers - have built buildings that aspire to the difficult condition of classics. To attest to this, it is enough to go to the two great exhibitions that Porto dedicates to his two illustrious children: the first, In / discipline , curated by Nuno Grande and Carles Muro, collects in the Serralves Foundation an extraordinary anthology of plans, drawings , models and publications that account for the six decades of Siza's career; the second, Souto de Moura: memory, projects, works , is in charge of Franceso dal Co and Nuno Graça, and presents at the Casa da Arquitectura de Matosinhos the 40 years of the Portuguese architect's career through a fascinating original documentation.
That both samples - the most important ones that have been dedicated so far to both teachers - have coincided in Porto is probably the result of chance. Anyway, the synchrony points to another attribute that moves Siza and Souto away from the canonical model of the competitive, tense and even envious star architect : his trust in friendship. A friendship that grows in the decision to be close, to share the space: not only that of your beloved city, but also the space of the building (designed by Siza) where both have their studies , and that of the building (projected by Souto) where both have their homes. Siza and Souto's are parallel lives, which the classics would say.
Born in 1933, Álvaro Siza renounced his youth vocations as a hockey player and sculptor to please his father, but this initial disenchantment did not prevent his talent from surfacing in the two works he completed without having yet turned 30: a restaurant and a Pool on the waterfront of Leça da Palmeira , next to Porto. Two substantial pieces in which, with prodigious precocity, Siza gave free rein to a modest and at the same time ambitious organicism where her ability to read the places and insert sculptural buildings with amazing ease was evident; buildings that seem to have always been there.
Better than any work built by those years in Portugal, the restaurant and the pool gave way to a handful of houses in which Siza matured the style to which she has not ceased, to a large extent, to be faithful: a radically modern, geometric style and white, almost cubist, and very personal despite his debts with Adolf Loos, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and, above all, Alvar Aalto. This handful of houses, together with a couple of bank branches, were the laboratory where Siza showed her talent when it came to monumentalizing the modest scales without stridency , finding the right tone for each place and creating buildings related to the context but not for less reluctant to casticism, as if Siza wanted to flee the topic of the melancholic beauty of her hometown. It was this condition of a Portuguese architect oblivious to Portuguese that made some clueless compatriots put the "radical" or "foreigner" sambenito.
The great leap in the teacher's career came after the Carnation Revolution, in 1974, when Siza took over some social and radically participatory projects where he suffered his ego as an architect but from those who came out very well, as evidenced by his White and popular colonies of Evora and Porto, for so many exemplary reasons. Then came the first orders outside Portugal - the Bonjour Tristesse block in the then really sad Berlin -, which gave it a name in the world and led to the collection, very long, of masterpieces that Siza has been building since then: the School of Architecture and the Serralves Foundation in Porto, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago, the Portugal Pavilion at the Lisbon Expo or the poetic Iberê Camargo Foundation in Portalegre.
For his part, Souto de Moura, born in 1952, was formed in the years in which, due to the influence of structuralism and semiotics , architects were taught (perhaps) to think, but not to build buildings. It was a tare that he got rid of learning the trade with Siza in the red years of the Carnation Revolution, and maturing very quickly his own architecture to give rise, already in the 1980s, to three works - the Municipal Market of Braga, the Cultural Center of Porto and the House in Nevogilde - which are fundamental because they already contain the ingredients that should be characteristic of Souto's work: attention to the place, compositional clarity , constructive will, work with the memory and vocation of service.
They are also features of the works that, later, would support Souto's international success: exquisite houses such as Moledo's, cyclopean endowments such as the Braga Football Stadium , sculptural museums such as Paula Rego's, civic infrastructures such as the Porto metro , or surprising rehabilitations such as the Convent of Bernardas in Tavira. All of them constructions that, in their diversity, point to a facet that distinguishes Souto de Siza in the end: his ability to move through different types and languages while remaining faithful to his principles . In this sense (and using the famous metaphor of Isaiah Berlin), it could be said that, unlike Siza - a hedgehog architect who knows a unique and great thing -, Souto is a fox architect who has no ambition to surrender to varied strategies already Somewhat contradictory times.
To get an idea of the peculiar way in which both teachers make architecture, you can use their drawings. If Siza, one of the great artists of our time, draws surprisingly safe lines in whose poetic arabesques it is possible to guess an unconscious cultural references very rich but always true to himself, Souto, equally skilled with the pencil but less sparing to the When recognizing their influences, gather nervous strokes to find answers that do not come from personal expression as well as from restless and fluctuating inquiry through the elements of architecture. Again, style is man.
It is rare that whoever likes Siza's work also does not appreciate Souto's (and vice versa), despite being so different. The reason, perhaps, is that both respond to the same ethical drive - the only truly cosmopolitan one - that links the architect to the places where he builds, the materials he works with, the artisans who build their buildings and the people for whom he designs. It is this ethical drive that, beyond well-managed localism, ironic modesty or even the way of dressing, makes both architects two rare adverts in the globalization landscape. Siza-Souto, Souto-Siza: two rare birds whose flight is as easy to admire as, alas, difficult to imitate.
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