Álvaro Siza Vieira in Porto Alegre, Brazil

By Raymund Ryan - 5 January 2010

The greatest buildings by Álvaro Siza achieve extraordinary balance: between “statement” and discretion, between surprise and comprehensibility, between architecture as freestanding sculpture and architecture as contiguous fabric, between overt Modernity and a respect for history that includes a poetic incorporation of architectural history itself. The Iberê Camargo Foundation, recently completed in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, makes this spatial and cultural equilibrium, so characteristic of Siza’s work, literally concrete. It is also of critical significance for Latin America being a rare new work, in that vast continent, by an international architect of this caliber.
The site might have intimidated lesser talents, or lulled them into a simplistic solution. There’s an escarpment, with feral trees on top; a flat sliver below of cleared terrain; a busy road with traffic departing Porto Alegre; and a vast surface of water, Lake Guaíba, more lagoon than estuary as several rivers make their way to the Atlantic in the far distance. There is here a simultaneous sense - caught by Siza - of compression between cliff-face and roadway and of expansion to the north and west across the great, grey body of water that is not yet sea. In this Southern Hemisphere location, the sun moves across the facade of the Camargo Foundation to melt in astonishing sunsets.
Siza’s parti is like a fortified letter L, four stories high yet dissipating, dropping suddenly, into a tail of outhouse pavilions alongside the road. This primal architectural move is attenuated parallel to the road such that a service lane is eked out between the building and hill behind and such that a chasm of space is implied in the elbow of the L overlooking the lake. This is where Siza threads the Camargo Foundation’s most memorable and curious element, a stack of enclosed ramps zigzagging back-and-forth between ends of the L. There are almost no windows. One is drawn instead to the complex...