Materia-prima / Raw material : a view of Álvaro Siza's archive

The volume in the series “from the Collection”, by André Tavares and Susanne Cotter, presents the documentary spectrum that makes up the Álvaro Siza Archive in the Serralves Collection.

Taken as raw material to build knowledge and generate a new understanding of Siza's work, the Archive reveals the incessant use of drawing as a working tool, the prefiguration of forms and spaces through sketch and technical drawing in a process of successive approximation to the desired result. But it also reveals various documentation — correspondence with clients, photographic records of places waiting for the works, opinions of the multiple actors involved in the construction processes, minutes of meetings and reports of tensions in the construction sites — which testify to an infinity of episodes that, despite invisible in the constructed work, contribute to the definition of a unique practice.

André Tavares, Susanne Cotter

Serralves, 2018

21 X 15 cm, 260 pages