Álvaro Siza Vieira in expansion, at Serralves
Álvaro Siza Vieira is a striking name in national and international contemporary architecture. His constant presence, with an ongoing and unique production, translates into a priceless body of work. His most recent project, the Álvaro Siza Wing at Serralves, adds to and complements the architect’s outstanding oeuvre. With a remarkable formal flair, this building is as much an expression of his singular disciplinary expertise as it is of his superb aesthetic sensibility. It will surely be one of his finest masterpieces.
The new wing of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art results from and celebrates the architect’s long and close relationship with the institution. Its name, the Álvaro Siza Wing, honours its author with a well-earned tribute. The building also reinforces and emphasises another bond: the one between the museum, including the art it shelters, and nature. The new wing seems to have been carved out of the park, embedded in its vegetation and surrounded by trees. The architect’s intention was precisely for the building not to stand out, but rather to be part of its surroundings, bearing continuity and likeness to the museum’s main structure. This is a work of architecture in full harmony with its setting. Faced with growing concern about architecture’s role in sustainability and the environmental crisis, I would like to stress the urgency of nurturing this relationship with and respect for nature.
Álvaro Siza’s father, Júlio Siza Vieira, was a sculptor, and his son’s work reveals the influence of this artistic field. When looking at the architect’s countless projects, they are precisely the outcome of the relationship between architectural and sculptural objects, whilst the new project stands as one of his most wonderful cases of the encounter and intersection between these two areas and their formal and plastic expressions. Indeed, more than just a building, it is a monument.
As well as the sheer size of the area and its high ceilings, supporting and evidencing the construction’s magnitude, the numerous cut-outs and volumes cleverly designed between the walls and ceilings are especially striking. The light, the windows, the relationship with the outside, the communication and movement between the different rooms add to the space’s flow and openness, all of which are typical and cross-cutting features of Siza Vieira’s practice. These same elements guide and steer the eye and the body in a magnetic, somehow poetic rhythm.
The new wing is accessed from the museum’s main building, and the two are connected. The transition between these two areas is organic, as they share the same materials: the outside is covered in gypsum and concrete, and the inside is marble and wooden floors and finishes. Using the architect’s own words, however, “located on the new building’s façade, immediately across from the bridge connecting it to the existing Museum, there is a special triangular-shaped window, as if pointing out that we are entering a different building“.
The purpose of the new wing is to present exhibitions from the Serralves Collection on the first floor and architectural exhibitions on the second, emphasising and fortifying the connection and dialogue between both fields. The exhibition hall covers more than 44% of the space, plus a further 75% on the ground floor for storage, both for new acquisitions and for the Serralves, CACE and BPP collections, among others, such as Siza Vieira’s own archives.
The new wing is scheduled to open as an exhibition area in early 2024, with two exhibitions, one from the Serralves Collection and one focusing on the architect’s work. But the wing is open to visitors, providing a unique opportunity to explore, contemplate and experience this wonderful work of architecture in its geometric glory and touching luminosity.
Between the Museum of Contemporary Art, opened in 1999, the Cinema House Manoel de Oliveira in 2019, containing the film-maker’s collection, the Gardeners’ House in 2021, located in the Park, and, in the same year, the restoration of the Serralves Villa to better adapt it to displaying art, an impressive set of buildings is emerging to establish Serralves as the site where most of the architect’s projects are to be found.
Álvaro Siza Vieira is the quintessential modern Portuguese architect, whose legacy is both unrivalled and extensive. With a career spanning sixty-eight years, dating back to 1955, when he graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Porto, he is Portugal’s most renowned and award-winning architect, most notably for having been given the PRITZKER Prize, considered to be architecture’s Nobel Prize. His works are ageless, insurmountably contemporary and objects of eternal wonder, interest, research and reference. Several generations have been inspired, educated and their ideas moulded by his work, whilst many call him their master. Portuguese architecture is to a great extent Siza Vieira.