World's most underrated architect: Alvaro Siza

The Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza picked up another significant honor today: The Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects. That's on top of the Pritzker Prize he won in 1992 and a slew of other international awards he's landed during the course of a five-decade career.

Still, whenever I'm asked to name the most underrated architect in the world, Siza is my pick. I don't think this latest medal will change that. After all, in an age of of jet-setting design-world celebrity, the bearded Siza is something of a monk-like figure. He doesn't often leave his hometown of Porto these days; and his restrained, mostly bone-white work, faithfully Modernist but also richly sculptural, isn't particularly impressive in two dimensions, which means that magazine editors and architecture-obsessed Web surfers tend not to give his buildings a second look.

But in person, as you walk through them, those buildings come alive as moving essays on the possibilities of using simple materials and basic geometric volumes to shape architectural space in profound ways. And though they avoid easy signs of contextualism or historical references, they seem to grow up inexorably from their settings.

Siza's firm doesn't operate a website, as far as I can tell, but more information on his work can be found here and here. A brief video tour of his latest significant project, a museum for the Ibere Camargo Foundation in Porto Alegre, Brazil, is here.

--Christopher Hawthorne

Photos: Upper by (...) via Flickr; lower by inelsonrocha via Flickr.

Comments

[Deirdre]

Gold Medal

[Jorge]

UNDERRATED????? By whom? This is SOO typical american. Anything that you don´t know, doesn´t exist.
PATHETIC

[sue-meng lau]

I completely agree, I was in Porto years ago, and I went to see all his work and the experience was far better than any photography or drawing of his work. In fact, my photographs turned out flat. I love his church.

[Vitor Gabriel]

You can visit the web-based library Últimas SIZA for the most extensive set of projects
http://www.ultimasreportagens.com/ultimassiza/index.html

[LBJ]

Jorge, unless you are in love with your outrage and addicted to the constant high, I think you should just relax. Yes, Americans: yawn. Regardless: there are hundreds of global architects that I - boorish American - follow closely, and so many more architectural firms as well as individuals just starting out -and I still manage to discover someone new every day to marvel over and delve into their body of work. Tragically, you have made your own point: he is so 'underrated' -semantics aside- that he must be brought to the attention of many more in just such a manner, a nice thump on the forehead. If he weren't underrated, fancy prizes aside, everyone would be like, oh yeah: Renzo, Frank, Nouvel, etc, oh more curvy and obscene gestures in Dubai ... yawn. Big picture I have no quarrel with you, but seriously? To even name one human 'the most underrated in the whole of our world' is in and of itself profoundly absurd.

underrated by media - not by architects

[guitarchitect]

how can he be "under-rated" if he has won the PRITZKER, let alone the RIBA gold and the "slew" of other medals the author mentions.

There's a difference between being unknown to architecture hobbyists (who may only know renxo, zaha, frank, etc), but underrated he is not.

[kolohe]

relatively unknown and thus underrated (in the United States only).
it really amazes me sometimes how insular this country is.
i

[Arora]

I'm one of those Americans who wasn't aware of Siza's architecture until I read this article. So much of Architecture and Art is driven by market forces that global geniuses are sometimes overlooked while the spotlight remains focused on
mediocrity driven by nepotism.

[mauz]

this article is just so embarrassing for the media, how in the world could you say a PRITZKER winner is under rated, are you a rookie?