Books
A Tribute from Spain
It is hard to think of a contemporary architect who has stirred up so much consensus among colleagues and within the culture world, and even in that world inhabited by the fauna – exotic to many – of the ‘general public.’ The consensus around Siza and the echo that his oeuvre has had among critics and in the media are such that having to say something – let alone so-mething new – about his person and his work poses a problem.
An excellent writer and here a conscientious editor, Ángel Martínez García-Posada was aware of this challenge when he set out to put together what has turned out to be a beautiful – if rather controversial – testimony of the Spanish National Architecture Prize awarded to Siza in 2019. So he chose to produce not so much a monograph as a carefully pondered tribute from Spain, the aim being not to extol virtues which are already a given, but to enrich our picture of Siza from perspectives that, to use the master’s own words, have to do with reason and the heart in equal measures.
Being about the Portuguese architect, the endeavor has been grounded on image and word, so the book comprises two parts that can be taken jointly or separately. The first addresses the idea that a great architect’s works form a single oeuvre, and takes stock of Siza’s work from 1958 to 2018 through the photographer Juan Rodríguez, whose retina in black and white tra-ces a highly personal visual approach. The second presents 18 texts by Spanish critics, me in-cluded, who give their takes on Siza from different prisms.
