Álvaro Siza Vieira

Siza wanted to be a sculptor and enrolled in architecture at Porto instead, where Fernando Távora taught him that a modern building could be sited by reading the ground rather than clearing it. His early works at Leça da Palmeira — the Boa Nova tea house and the tidal pools — set the method: low horizontal planes of raw concrete threaded between existing rock, so that what is built and what was there stop being distinguishable. The SAAL housing programme after the 1974 revolution gave him large-scale social commissions at Bouça and Malagueira; later came the Serralves Museum, the Porto architecture faculty and buildings across Europe, Korea and Brazil. The white rendered volumes and the offset, apparently arbitrary geometries are the visible part of an argument about topography that has run for sixty-five years.