Nadir and Siza: cross geometries

Abstract

Over the last few years, among several written texts, I have been challenging Álvaro Siza's conceptual method of architect (who liked to have been a sculptor), trying to decode (as if this were possible) his remarkable ability to reinvent memories, to interpret geography, to be contaminated by so many "other cultures". This exercise of otherness - being both myself and the other; being from here and from the world, being local and universal - of clear personal or Torguian affinity, leads Siza to create works that are his, original and unrepeatable, but that resonate in our memory as familiar spaces; or, in other words, as if they had always belonged to the life of a place, a city, or a character.