print March 2016

TYPOLOGY AND PARTICIPATION: THE ARCHITECTURE OF ÁLVARO SIZA

AT THE AGE OF EIGHTY-TWO, the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza is possibly the only modern master who, after having realized some four hundred works in a diverse range of scales and programs, remains as firmly committed as ever to the unfinished socialist project that galvanized the European avant-garde throughout the interwar era. Siza began as a housing architect, and while the first decade of his career was largely devoted to the design of private houses, he soon forayed into the quintessentially modernist typology of social housing during the intense optimism of the so-called Portuguese

print March 1981

Intimations and Tactility: Excerpts From a Fragmentary Polemic

Man’s history will progressively become a vast explanation in which each civilization will work out its perception of the world by confronting all others. But this process has hardly begun. It is probably the great task of generations to come. No one can say what will become of our civilization when it has really met different civilizations by means other than the shock of conquest and domination. But we have to admit that this encounter has not yet taken place at the level of an authentic dialogue. That is why we are in a kind of lull or interregnum in which we can no longer practice the

print April 1972

Notes from Underground

You see, if it were not a palace but a chicken coop and rain started, I might creep into the chicken coop to avoid getting wet and yet I would not call the chicken coop a palace out of gratitude to it for sheltering me from the rain. You laugh, you even say that in such circumstances a chicken coop is as good as a mansion. Yes, I answer, if one had to live simply to avoid getting wet.

—Fydor Dostoevsky, 1864

Perspective was the original sin of Western painting.

—Andre Bazin, 1945

IN TIMES OF TRANSITION, in architecture at least, the true academy is to be found, if at all, underground. There it

Kenneth Frampton