Measure of the West: A Representation of Travel 9780773555426

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THE MEASURE OF THE WEST

Álvaro Siza

Giovanni Chiaramonte

The Measure of the West A REPRESENTATION OF TRAVEL

Edited by Roberto Cremascoli Laura Geronazzo

Texts by Giovanni Chiaramonte Roberto Cremascoli Álvaro Siza Mirko Zardini Translated from the Italian by Craig Lund

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© 2018 Ultreya, Milano All rights reserved Drawings © Alvaro Siza Photographs © Giovanni Chiaramonte Texts © Alvaro Siza, Giovanni Chiaramonte, Mirko Zardini, and Roberto Cremascoli English edition © McGill-Queen’s University Press 2018 ISBN 978-0-7735-5525-9 (paper) ISBN 978-0-7735-5542-6 (ePDF) Legal deposit third quarter 2018 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Italy by Grafiche Aurora, Verona

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Misura dell'Occidente. English The measure of the West: a representation of travel / Álvaro Siza, Giovanni Chiaramonte; edited by Roberto Cremascoli, Laura Geronazzo; texts by Giovanni Chiaramonte, Roberto Cremascoli, Álvaro Siza, Mirko Zardini; translated from the Italian by Craig Lund. Includes indexes. Manuscript originally written in Italian and first published in Portuguese under title: A medida do ocidente: viagem na representação. The Italian edition will be published under title: La misura dell'Occidente: viaggio nella rappresentazione, along with the English edition. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7735-5525-9 (paper). – ISBN 978-0-7735-5542-6 (ePDF) 1. Siza, Alvaro, 1933– –Travel. 2. Chiaramonte, Giovanni, 1948– –Travel. 3. Cities and towns in art. 4. Cities and towns– –Pictorial works. 5. Art and architecture. 6. Architectural photography. I. Title. N72.A75M5713 2018 720 C2018-902937-4 C2018-

Contents

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True Things Mirko Zardini Landscape, Everything Our Eyes Perceive: Ecce Homo Roberto Cremascoli

12–31

Álvaro Siza Texts and Drawings

32–63

Giovanni Chiaramonte Texts and Photographs

64–111

Álvaro Siza Texts and Drawings

112–127

Giovanni Chiaramonte Texts and Photographs

128–175

Álvaro Siza Texts and Drawings

176–207

Giovanni Chiaramonte Texts and Photographs

210

Indexes of Drawings and Photographs

212

Biographies

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Mirko Zardini True Things

Trips begin in Italy. It is no longer a destination – Italy as a place capable of encompassing a world, or an idea of the world. It is only a starting point, a tribute to the memory of something that we can only leave behind in order to explore those which are, apparently, other places, other worlds. From here, the journeys of Giovanni Chiaramonte and Álvaro Siza begin, unspooling across Europe, and continuing on to other continents: Africa, the Americas, Asia. The trips are driven by different intentions. For Chiaramonte, more than a series of trips, it is a long pilgrimage without any precise destination, but with a clear goal: to search out the reasons for and the limits of, certainly not physical, that West which has been marked by crisis and decline. Chiaramonte’s is indeed a Western gaze, from a perspective embodied in the camera obscura, from the square that accurately crops and frames events. However, it has now become a gaze that is full of doubt and melancholy, anxious and suspectful, but at the same time driven by the hope of finding in some other place that which, in his family’s hometown of Gela, Italy, appears underneath the fragile ruins of a column, lovingly surrounded and guarded, in the photograph, by trees. The shape of the column reappears, in its many iterations, throughout his travels, from Berlin to Évora, Istanbul to Athens, New Orleans to Havana, and becomes an element for measuring not what is familiar to us, but what continues to elude us and go unrecognized. It truly disappears only in the last image, facing the sea. Now it is behind us.

Siza’s trips, however, are made jovial by abandoning preoccupations and day-to-day events. They represent moments of freedom, the embodiment of a modern idea of travel: pleasure that is free from necessity. It is this suspended condition that allows him to immerse himself in diverse worlds and places, and it establishes a disenchanted exploration, the hand sliding across the page as it traces. Photographs taken by Siza are rare, and they date back several years. He says that taking photographs keeps him from seeing. It is only by putting pen to paper that he is truly able to hone his gaze and go beyond the usual opacity of film that places itself between us and the world. The pen insists on certain elements, lines thicken around them, and at the same time it neglects and ignores. The sketches, with their nervous traces, reveal places that are brought to life by figures, by light and shade, by plants and animals, by everyday objects, by the very hand that appears occasionally to measure the presence of bodies. In that moment, the experience of those places, and not the places themselves, appears before us. In spite of his reluctance toward photography, only his sketches seem capable of capturing the time and life that move through a place. Even though they are created with different intentions, these sketches and photographs appear before us as coherent traces of the same drawing, driven by the same restlessness to see, discover, understand, learn. Differences between the black and white drawings and the colour photographs quickly fade. They are identical because, as Alfred Stieglitz observed, all true things are the same.

Roberto Cremascoli Landscape, Everything Our Eyes Perceive: Ecce Homo

Álvaro Siza photographer, Giovanni Chiaramonte architect; Siza frames like a photographer, Chiaramonte organizes space like an architect. Álvaro draws frenetically, with an instantaneous yearning to learn. Giovanni waits with monastic patience to take his photographs. In the silent gaze of Álvaro Siza there is a need to record, because everything that he puts in his sketchbooks is part of a continual learning process. His curiosity has transformed him into a vampire, and blood is all that he observes. Siza is in no hurry. He knows how to wait, patiently, and takes advantage of the silence. In the landscape of Siza, there is everything that exists in the visual field: mankind. In the transcendent gaze of Giovanni Chiaramonte there is a will to transport all that surrounds him toward other dimensions, and vice versa, back to the beginning, paradise. His world, made up of ancient ruins and ruins from the future, constitutes a stratigraphy of humanity that grows and transforms, in which the ancient survives in the modern, and produces the contemporary. Chiaramonte’s gaze upon mankind goes beyond the entire world and finds a place in infinity. Good architecture needs a transport vehicle, photography. Images allow for a consensus of the critique and, more importantly, they create an opportunity to get to know a space, a building, a city, without physically having to go there. Good architectural photography does not mislead, instead it shows, little by little, slowly, the surrounding context. Nothing to hide. A building exists in a reality, is part of it, and helps construct it. When Giovanni Chiaramonte, in 1983, depicted Álvaro Siza’s intervention in Kreuzberg, Berlin, he did so without artifice, preamble, or any spectacular development. He shows the reality nascosta in prospettiva (hidden in view), Bonjour Tristesse standing alongside buildings that are

noble, decadent, beautiful, or ugly, and like “Ecce Homo,” it is presented as is, a contribution to future combinations. If life is the art of the encounter, Berlin was the stage for the encounter between photography and architecture, between photographer and architect, between Giovanni and Álvaro. Pierluigi Nicolin, with his magazine Lotus, was the one who introduced photographer Giovanni to the architecture scene. The critic Vittorio Savi, who collaborated with Luigi Ghirri starting in 1980, gave Chiaramonte’s name to Pierluigi Nicolin in February of 1983. A month later, Nicolin dropped by the mythical Studio Marconi, a famous art gallery in Milan, to see Chiaramonte’s exhibition, Paesaggio italiano (Italian landscape), a colour section from his book, Giardini e paesaggi (Gardens and landscapes), published the same month by Jaca Book, with a fundamental preface by Arturo Carlo Quintavalle. Giovanni Chiaramonte was called to the Lotus editorial office the following month, bringing with him a book freshly published in France and Italy, again by Jaca Book, entitled Immagini della Fotografia europea contemporanea (Images of contemporary European photography), with an essay “Luogo e identità in fotografia” (Place and identity in photography), in which, starting with a few reflections on the modernism of Bruno Zevi, Romano Guardini, Hans Sedlmayr, Christian Norberg-Schulz, and the poetry of T.S. Eliot and Czesław Miłosz, he presented his considerations on photography as a fundamental hermeneutic dimension of places in the city of mankind. The beginning was rather tempestuous, as Giovanni recounts: Indeed, I showed up in regular clothes, but Pierluigi did not pay any attention to me because he was expecting a photographer dressed like a photographer (“But you don’t look much like a photographer!”) ... the discussion started to heat up when I asked him

to put me in charge of the project to shoot Piazza della Vittoria, an emblematic piece of fascist architecture created by Marcello Piacentini in Brescia. I explained to him that by photographing level, and in a square format, we may risk incurring some unpleasant, controversial critiques, noting also that Pierluigi had been an activist in Lotta Continua [Continuous struggle]. Ferlenga, Ortelli, and Teyssot also participated in the discussion, and the unmentionable name of Sedlmayr and his book, The Lost Centre, came up. We then acknowledged that our critical viewpoints, his [Pierluigi] being architectural, and mine [Giovanni] photographical, actually coincided. And so, in July of 1983, Giovanni Chiaramonte did the shoot in black and white, and it received positive feedback from the editorial board at Lotus magazine. At the end of December of the same year, Chiaramonte was sent to Berlin to do an initial shoot on work underway for the IBA (Berlin’s International Building Exhibition). He was received by Marco De Michelis and Oswald Mathias Ungers who explained the reasoning behind the project. For this occasion, Giovanni found himself face to face with Bonjour Tristesse, and decided to devote two full days to shooting it. The edifice was on the cover of Lotus’s issue 41 as well as the memorable Professione poetica (Poetic profession). For that occasion, at the request of Lotus, for economic reasons, he did this shoot in black and white as well, using small format (35mm) cameras. In the spring of 1984, thanks to his book, Immagini della Fotografia europea contemporanea, Chiaramonte received a commission from the IBA. The development of his reflections stemming from his photography convinced Pierluigi to pursue the hermeneutic work on Siza. So, Nicolin sent Chiaramonte to Porto in the spring of 1985, where he finally got to meet Álvaro Siza and organize photo shoots on his buildings scat-

tered throughout Portugal, all the way to Évora. Giovanni describes the encounter as from another time, the time of real people: I was hugely surprised, arriving late in the afternoon at the bus station in Évora, to find Siza waiting for me, then carrying my luggage to the hotel, and over dinner talking about his idea of modernism, and discovering his rapport with Milanese rationalism and Giovanni Muzio. To walk around the construction sites of Évora with Siza, during those days in April, was a very profound experience for me, and I promised him I would come back soon to do an analytical work in colour, which I did. I was able to return thanks to Jaca Book, which was publishing the second series of the international journal L’umana Avventura in four languages. The text accompanying the photo shoot was written by Pierluigi, and I wrote an essay. Since then, Giovanni Chiaramonte has never left the architecture scene and has many times had the opportunity to meet up with his friend Álvaro Siza in the infinite landscapes. Part of his architectural iconography are images of the tidal pools at Leça da Palmeira (Professione poetica, 1986), the Faculty of Architecture in Porto (Lotus 88, 1996), the Galician Center for Contemporary Art (Lotus 88, 1996), the Bonaval Park in Santiago de Compostela (Álvaro Siza, Dentro la città [Álvaro Siza, Inside the City], 1996), and the Chiado district in Lisbon (Álvaro Siza, Dentro la città, 1996). Chiaramonte made several trips to Portugal and did many photo shoots there. In 2009, in the Portuguese Center of Photography in Porto, his photographs from the collection Ai confini del mare (At the edge of the sea) impress in a wonderful exhibition on light, the sea, and mankind. If “life is the art of the encounter, even though there might be so much discord throughout life” (Vinicius de Moraes), then the one between Giovanni and Álvaro was the encounter.

UNITED STATES

CUBA

PA N A M A

COLOMBIA

BRAZIL PERU

CHILE

RUSSIA ENGLAND GERMANY SWITZERLAND FRANCE S PA I N

CZECH REPUBLIC AUSTRIA I T A LY

PORTUGAL GREECE

TURKEY

MACAU - CHINA

EGYPT CAPE VERDE INDIA

Travel Drawings No other drawings give me more pleasure than these: travel drawings. Travelling is a true test, individual or collective. Each one of us, when we depart, leaves behind a suitcase full of preoccupations, problems, stresses, annoyances, prejudices. At the same time, we forfeit a world of little comforts and the perverse appeal of routine. Travellers, be they friend or foreign, can be divided into two types: admirable and unbearable. A good friend truly suffers because the World is big. Never could he allow himself – he says – to do a repeat visit: he gets agitated, nervous, tense, his eyes pop out of their sockets. I like to sacrifice many things, to see only that which attracts me in the moment, walking aimlessly, without a map and with an absurd inclination to discover things. What is better than sitting on a terrace in Rome, late in the evening, savouring anonymity and a strangely coloured drink – monuments and sights yet to see and laziness slowly seeps in? Suddenly, the pencil or the pen starts to fixate on images, faces in the foreground, faded contours or luminous details, the hands that are drawing them. At first the lines are shy, withdrawn, imprecise, then stubbornly analytical, with sharp, definitive strokes, exhilaratingly free; then, weary and increasingly irrelevant. Throughout the course of a real trip the eyes, and through them the mind, acquire an unexpected ability. We learn an inordinate amount; what we learn reappears, and then dissolves into the lines that we trace. Álvaro Siza Boston, April 1988

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I T A LY

ROME

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ROME

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ROME

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… indescribable Naples, the deserted waterfront on Sunday mornings, when the ship comes in from Palermo.

NAPLES

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... here, in the south of Europe, so close to and just opposite Africa which cannot be seen, a territory of subversion and joy and misery, on the other side of the waters that can again unite and transform and transfigure frustration, breaking the parentheses, perhaps these marble beings from Piazza Pretoria, tired of the past and of the knowledge from the North, South, East, and West, renew the discussion and eyes meet with a different intensity; maybe the natural angles and manual instruments can restore to the thought the desire to create. We do not comprehend the conversations of the Marble Gods; but from these terraces and through them, despite any potential fog, another shore is in sight, the agile movements of animals roaming free.

PA L E R M O

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… Long bridges of Venice, where every monument is a detail.

VENICE

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VENICE

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SIENA

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AGRIGENTO

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I T A LY

GELA

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On the viewing screen of my camera obscura, in the clear depth of field that, from the foreground in which I am immersed, pushes and expands the views along the vanishing points towards the infinite horizon, the real appears to me as eternally undetermined and never determinable. Having attempted to embrace the real in its totality has gradually freed me from every possible determination, elicited in me the art of life, and cleared a vision of existence that, unexpected and unthinkable, materializes as repeatedly new, in and around us.

POGGIOREALE

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SALEMI

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G E R M A N Y

BERLIN

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POTSDAM

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BERLIN

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P O R T U G A L

ÉVORA

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Realism is the experience and representation of the infinite in the undetermined and indeterminable, which is the existence of the world and mankind as an event, a happening, a story. I can use the name “infinite realism” to illustrate the path of my photography, because the act that brings it to life is generated by this experience and this way of seeing. Infinite realism is the reception of the object by the subject; it is the understanding of the Other by the I, and the relationship that leaves each one in their irreducible difference and identity; and it is the transcription of what is, in the world, given before the eyes and inside the eyes of the depicted man that represents it.

MIRÓBRIGA

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ÉVORA

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ÉVORA

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LISBON

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ÉVORA

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The image in my work emerges as a mirror of the world and always reveals the death of man, not only because the reception, understanding, and transcription of information displays its presence in the world, but also because the very dynamic of such a reception, such an understanding, such a transcription seeks and dictates a sort of spiritual death of the subject, its informed conscious will to set itself apart, a free and necessary sacrifice. The subject has to flatten itself until it becomes a simple and pure ground for reflection, so that on this surface, in the representation, the object’s specular image can appear.

LISBON

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T U R K E Y

I S TA N B U L

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I S TA N B U L

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I S TA N B U L

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F R A N C E

VERSAILLES

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VERSAILLES

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… Saint-Michel. Outline the profile of the dormer windows, of the zinc rooftops. A face appears. Drawing it is of no use. Fix the moment of ecstasy within the eyes. The towers of Notre Dame rise up, the gargoyles of the Sainte-Chapelle explode.

PA R I S

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ROQUEBRUNE-CAP-MARTIN

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S W I T Z E R L A N D

… that which impresses us about Le Corbusier, and which essentially runs through his work, written or drawn, is the disconcerting refusal of the already said, a sort of candour, a restlessness that cannot be destroyed by analytical and synthetic abilities, and convictions. A kind of insecurity, a refusal of self-sufficiency, underneath an apparent arrogance. Embracing a worker in front of a presumed imperfect wall.

VEVEY

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C O L O M B I A

… the things that you can find in a city, ambling, with a light and open mind. A door handle, an odd iron window, a Spanish house that no longer is one, a Dutch brick facade, or a German one that is different, an imitation of a classical column that looks like a tree, and people, people, people: white, creole, black, metis. There is an imperceptible breath that runs through and transfigures all.

C A R TA G E N A

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C A R TA G E N A

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C A R TA G E N A

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M A C A U - C H I N A

MACAU

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MACAU

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… Macau, made of ancient crossroads.

MACAU

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B R A Z I L

When a mistake is made, I believe, then Nature intervenes. From terraces and windows and doors, from the first to the twentieth floor, there is an explosion of leaves, flowers, branches, that hug houses and rocks. The streets are covered by the foliage of the trees; vines creep up the facades and embankments, attenuating the violence of the lights and shapes. In the event of despair, the Sugarloaf or the Corcovado rise up.

RIO DE JANEIRO

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RIO DE JANEIRO

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S Ã O PA U L O

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S A LV A D O R

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G E R M A N Y

Rigorous and multifaceted Berlin – rugged streets of Kreuzberg, fragments from the birth of the Modern movement, some brilliant illustrations, monumental factories, gardens, lakes, ruins.

BERLIN

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BERLIN

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E G Y P T

Were the edges on the pyramids perfect? There is something that troubles archaeologists. How is it possible that a stone construction as perfect as a Greek temple came about in Egypt, centuries ago, with no approximations nor precedents known to us? A construction that looks modern.

SAQQARA

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GIZA

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I N D I A

I arrive in Goa, by chance, on the day of the pilgrimage to the cathedral. There is a long line of people awaiting their moment to enter and admire the gilded sculpture, adore the mummified finger of Saint Francis Xavier (so they say). There are wooden benches around the churchyard, installed under a canopy of glorious trees. On display are examples of local artisanry, religious figurines made of terracotta and painted with bright colours. They are identical to those that are still sold today in Minho. But the Virgin has eastern eyes.

GOA

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GOA

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GOA

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N O VA G O A

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DAMAN

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G R E E C E

AT H E N S

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Any view, even one on the most desolate, insignificant, commonplace towns in the world, can assume a bright aspect due to an unexpected event, and can transform into the splendour of an action over which no power nor possession can be claimed, and which is impossible to know in any definitive way. Every view is an image and, as such, in the representable proximity to all that surrounds us, it keeps the immeasurable and boundless presence of totality intact and intangible. The evidence of a mystery that appears in and through it makes itself visible.

AT H E N S

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AT H E N S

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AT H E N S

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AT H E N S

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U N I T E D

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S T A T E S

NEW ORLEANS

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When the focus of the lens is set to infinity, even photography, in the embrace of its view, rediscovers its ability to cross every hidden depth of the real, making it emerge from what is visible in the representation. Through a person’s gaze, in this time and moment, the specular opacity of a photograph can become the diaphanous transparency of a light on the world and on mankind that precedes and creates both the world and man. Such a light can create a new and significant image of the world only in a human’s gaze. Pasolini wrote on 13 May 1962: “Only the sun / imprinting film can express / in all this old hate a little old love.”

NEW ORLEANS

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NASHVILLE

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A U S T R I A

… Salzburg – legions of senior tourists.

SALZBURG

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U N I T E D

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S T A T E S

ST LOUIS

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LOS ANGELES

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LOS ANGELES

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137

Along the straight furrow of the street, tall towers emerge, side by side, like trees in a forest. The architects suffered when, right next to the one they had just built, another went up, taller.

NEW YORK

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S P A I N

ALCOY

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141

… I had the initial feeling that maybe architecture was of more interest to me than anything else; that it was within my reach; I only needed windows, doors, baseboards, hardware, ceramic or stone cladding, gutters, drains. I felt the pulsating of the normal fitting pipes, of the electric cables; and the air moving across the walls. On the way back, we stopped to have lunch at a neighbourhood restaurant. I saw a sign that indicated: Colonia Güell.

BARCELONA

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143

… the cylinder of Charles V, an apparently odd appendage of what was the Alhambra, with an autonomous expression and a very different scale, that adds quality – transforming more than breaking or dissolving, but recreating the character of an unfragmentable architectural complex. An articulation of two expressions based on internal and external continuities, or discontinuities..

GRANADA

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C U B A

Spanish buildings, a tropical Chicago school, fortresses, crudely coloured automobiles from the fifties. Irresistible music. Everything and everyone in the streets, in the squares, on the promenade. Hemingway’s shadow suspended in the air.

H AVA N A

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H AVA N A

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149

H AVA N A

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P E R U

Enormous How they were erected, we don’t know – a stone wedge placed into every joint On the shiny surface, there are signs of a skilled cut Geometrical scars from someone Nearly imperceptible When the clouds stifle the severity of the sun

MACHU PICCHU

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MACHU PICCHU

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MACHU PICCHU

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MACHU PICCHU

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C Z E C H R E P U B L I C

Crossing the Moldova on the Charles Bridge, making my way toward the castle. There is jazz in the air. Musicians and tourists and baroque images come together in small groups. It is difficult to reach the other side.

PRAGUE

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PRAGUE

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C A P E

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V E R D E

… there is a monumental fortress and a monumental cathedral – in ruins. All the rest is a complex of small houses, with roofs of straw or Marseille tiles (or concrete slabs or sheet metal). Houses with one door, two windows, and a backyard. Aligned according to the contours, around the bay. In this amphitheatre live wonderful people who do not want to leave, or who leave and return, every time the music calls them. There are many kids playing in the streets – promising for the future.

CIDADE VELHA

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165

CIDADE VELHA

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CIDADE VELHA

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R U S S I A

... the Kremlin is much different in proportion than I had imagined (photographers, sometimes, decide to mislead). It is not monumental, it is nice to walk among the buildings as though they were jewels. Pretty is the city’s skyline, strewn with towers and cupolas that were built specifically for that, as Professor Carlos Ramos said. Parks and gardens are evenly distributed, filled with healthy looking people, communicative people, even though the language is impenetrable to me.

MOSCOW

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C H I L E

A garden right in the middle of the city, unscathed by the horror of emptiness, is getting filled with a thousand objects: kiosks, statues, lakes and ponds, benches and stools, traffic signs or billboards, playgrounds for children that apparently transform into sculptures, large garbage containers, whimsically shaped fountains, any and all types of pavement. Here, there is room for silence, amid the sounds of the city. The trees and people breathe.

VA L PA R A Í S O

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G R E E C E

I am drawing the Acropolis from my hotel room. I copy the base – the tall stone wall that supports the terraces. Not the Parthenon. We cannot continuously face beauty’s glory. In the morning, I draw the curtains. The temple suddenly appears, floating over Athens.

NAUFLIA

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E N G L A N D

I focused my attention on the long rows of columns against the wall, made of grey stone that brought everything together. Vertical roof supports that have protected us since the beginning of our existence. I sat down and ordered a soft drink, looking at the spaces, the enormous doorway, and the street. I felt at peace amid the ruckus. A yellow lorry suddenly filled the doorway. For a few seconds, it totally transformed the courtyard.

LONDON

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M E X I C O

Y U C ATA N

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The representation staged by the optical image is inevitably configured as a drama: not only because human life is like this, but also because the image, in its very essence, is drama, necessitating the dynamism of the subject’s flattening and the obliteration of the I in order to become visible. My act of photographing is the act of staging such a representation: it is infinite realism since it reveals the form and figure of that real part that is the human, the human who is formally and figuratively a drama, or the living movement called to the never-ending search of its own meaning.

SAN CRISTÓBAL DE LAS CASAS

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MEXICO CITY

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P A N A M A

PA N A M A C I T Y

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In my images, the human world is revealed as an infinite surface immersed in a sort of luminous distance, suspended in time. The evidence of the elements in the foreground tries not to invade or block the enigmatic expanse of the visual field; therefore, it makes the view slowly open to the perception of events that are represented, most of the time, at the farthest reaches of the stage, or even on the horizon’s threshold. Within this movement of the gaze, time is analogous to a slow dance: it is a time for contemplating, made possible by the rarefaction of significant elements, and by the fact that they are put at a distance on the elevation of the ground’s prospective axes.

PA N A M A C I T Y

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187

PORTOBELO

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PORTOBELO

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PA N A M A C I T Y

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C U B A

H AVA N A

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H AVA N A

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H AVA N A

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H AVA N A

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Nothing should hit the observer’s gaze: nothing coming from inside the image should forcefully impose itself on the consciousness. The gaze should be able to decide freely if and how to penetrate the image and, after crossing the many levels of the picture, focusing on them gradually from the foreground to the infinity of the vanishing point, turn inward, inside the consciousness, and then turn back outward. Along this trip, which touches the extreme limits of the object – the world – and of the subject – humankind – I believe that every aspect of the real can reveal itself as a sublime view, the trace of a friendly closeness, the echo of a distant memory that has come back to light, like a feeling of love.

H AVA N A

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H AVA N A

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H AVA N A

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FINCA VIGIA

Appendices

Álvaro Siza Index of Drawings

page

013 015 017 019 021 023 025 027 029 031 065 067 069 071 073 075 077 079 081 083 087 08 091 093 095 097 099 101 103 105 107 109

Boston, April 1988 Rome, September 1980, sketchbook 66 Rome, September 1980, sketchbook 66 Rome, September 1980, sketchbook 66 Naples, January 1984, sketchbook 165 Palermo, October 1984, sketchbook 189 Venice, July 1994, sketchbook 373 Venice, July 1994, sketchbook 373 Siena, June 1988, sketchbook 270 Agrigento, August 1994, sketchbook 373 Versailles, January 1988, sketchbook 265 Versailles, January 1988, sketchbook 265 Paris, November 2000 Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, December 2001, sketchbook 503 Vevey, November 1981, sketchbook 96 Cartagena, March 1982, sketchbook 108 Cartagena, March 1982, sketchbook 108 Cartagena, March 1982, sketchbook 108 Macau, August 1982, sketchbook 115 Macau, February 1983, sketchbook 139 Rio de Janeiro, August 1982, sketchbook 118

Rio de Janeiro, 1990 São Paulo, 1998 Salvador, April 2002, sketchbook 508 Berlin, July 1983, sketchbook 147 Berlin, July 1983, sketchbook 147 Giza, September 1984, sketchbook 185 Giza, September 1984, sketchbook 185 Goa, December 1985, sketchbook 216 Goa, December 1985, sketchbook 216 Goa, December 1985, sketchbook 216 Nova Goa, December 1985, sketchbook 216

111 Daman, December 1985, sketchbook 216

129 131 133 135

Salzburg, October 1986 St Louis, October 1988, sketchbook 279 Los Angeles, June 2001, sketchbook 498 Los Angeles, January 2002,

137 139 141 143 145

New York, 2003, sketchbook 523 Alcoy, 1988 Barcelona, 2006 Granada, November 2010 Havana, December 1992,

sketchbook 504

sketchbook 340

147 Havana, January 1994, sketchbook 361 149 Havana, December 1992, sketchbook 340

151 Machu Picchu, June 1995, sketchbook 399

153 Machu Picchu, June 1995, sketchbook 399

155 Machu Picchu, June 1995, sketchbook 399

157 Machu Picchu, June 1995, 159 161 163 165

sketchbook 399

Prague, October 1996, sketchbook 425 Prague, October 1996, sketchbook 425 Cidade Velha, 2007 Cidade Velha, August 1998, sketchbook 451

167 Cidade Velha, August 1998, 169 171 173 175

sketchbook 451

Moscow, June 2001, sketchbook 497 Valparaíso, 2002, sketchbook 512 Nafplio, May 2007 London, 2014

Giovanni Chiaramonte Index of Photographs

page

033 035 037 039 041 043 045 047 049 051 053 055 057 059 061 063 113 115 117 119

Gela, 1996 Poggioreale, 1999 Salemi, 1989 Berlin, 1984 Potsdam, 1990 Berlin, 1988 Évora, 1996 Miróbriga, 1996 Évora, 1996 Évora, 1996 Lisbon, 1996 Évora, 1996 Lisbon, 1996 Istanbul, 1988 Istanbul, 1988 Istanbul, 1988 Athens, 1990 Athens, 1988 Athens, 1988 Athens, 1988

121 123 125 127 177 179 181 183 185 187 189 191 193 195 197 199 201 203 205 207

Athens, 1988 New Orleans, 1991 New Orleans, 1991 Nashville, 1991 Yucatan, 1996 San Cristóbal, 1996 Mexico City, 1996 Panama City, 1996 Panama City, 1996 Portobelo, 1996 Portobelo, 1996 Panama City, 1996 Havana, 1997 Havana, 1997 Havana, 1997 Havana, 1997 Havana, 1997 Havana, 1997 Havana, 1997 Finca Vigia,1997

Álvaro Siza

Álvaro Joaquim Melo Siza Vieira was born in Matosinhos in 1933. He studied architecture at the School of Fine Arts of the University of Porto from 1949 to 1955, and he saw his first project built in 1954. He collaborated with Professor Fernando Távora from 1955 to 1958. He taught at the School of Fine Arts from 1966 to 1969, returning in 1976 as assistant professor of construction. In addition to teaching there, he has been a visiting professor at the École polytechnique fédérale of Lausanne, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Los Andes in Bogotá, the Harvard Graduate School of Design as Kenzo Tange Visiting Professor. He also works as a professional architect in the city of Porto. Asked to submit proposals for international contests, he won first prize for the Schlesisches Tor, Kreuzberg, Berlin (built in 1984); the reclaiming of Campo di Marte, Venice (1985); the restructuring and expansion of the Casino and Winkler Café, Salzburg (1986); Centro cultural la Defensa in Madrid (with José Paulo Santos, 1988/89); J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California (with Pietro Testa, 1993); Pietà Rondanini room, Castello Sforzesco, Milan (1999); advanced special plan Recoletos-Prado, Madrid (with Juan Miguel Hernandez and Carlos Leon Riano, 2002); Toledo Hospital, La Coruña (with Sánchez-Horneros, 2003); Ciudad del Flamenco, Jerez de la Frontera (with Juan Miguel Hernández León, 2003); Alhambra Atrium, Granada (with Juan Domingo Santos, 2010). The Portuguese department of the International Association of Art Critics awarded him the Prize for Architecture in 1982. In 1988, he received the Gold Medal of the Superior Council of

Architecture of the College of Architects of Madrid; the Alvar Altar Medal; the Prince of Wales Prize in Urban Design from Harvard University; and the European Architectural Award by the EEC/Mies van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona. In 1992, he was awarded the Pritzker Prize by the Hyatt Foundation of Chicago for his lifelong achievements. In 1995, he received a Gold Medal from the Nara World Architecture Exposition. In 1996, he won the Secil Architecture Award and, in 1998, the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Art Association, Tokyo, and the Gold Medal from the Círculo de Bellas Artes of Madrid. In 2000, the Fondazione Frate Sole, in Pavia, awarded him the European Prize of Sacred Architecture. In 2001, he received the Wolf Prize in Arts in Israel. In 2002, he was awarded the Golden Lion in Venice. He received the Grand Prize for Urbanism in 2005 from the Ministère de l’Equipement des Transports de l’Aménagement du Territoire et du Tourisme de la Mer in Paris and the Prize in Architecture from the School of Architecture in Granada. In 2009, he was given the Royal Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects in London. In 2010, he received the Visual Arts Award from the Gabarron Foundation. In 2011, he was awarded the Gold Medal from the UIA in Tokyo. In 2012, he was given the Honorary Prize AR&PA by the Consejeria de Cultura y Turismo from the Castilla and León government in Valladolid. In 2014, he was awarded the Miles Crown Hall Americas Prize from the Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture in Chicago.

Giovanni Chiaramonte

Born in 1948 in Varese to parents from Gela, Giovanni Chiaramonte started his foray into photography in the late 1960s, working for the revival of figurativism, following a major abstract and informal period from certain trends in Pop Art and Conceptual Art. From the beginning, Chiaramonte’s images were developed in the theological and aesthetic tradition of R. Guardini, H.U. von Balthasar, and the Church of the East, introduced through P. Evdokimov, O. Clément, A. Tarkovsky, and have as a main theme the relationship between place and destiny in Western civilization. His publications include: Giardini e paesaggi, 1983; Terra del ritorno, 1989; Penisola delle figure, 1993; Westwards, 1996; Ai confini del mare, 1999; Milano: Cerchi della città di mezzo, 2000; In corso d’opera, 2000; Frammenti dalla Rocca: Cefalù, 2002; Dolce è la luce, 2003; Abitare il mondo: Europe, 2004; Berlin, Figure, 2004; Attraverso la pianura, 2005; Senza foce, 2005; Come un enigma_ Venezia, 2006; Nascosto in prospettiva, 2007; In Berlin, 2009; L’altro_Nei volti nei luoghi, 2010– 11; Via Fausta, 2012, E.I.A.E. – Et In Arcadia Ego, 2012; Interno perduto_L’immanenza del terremoto, 2012; Inscape_Piccola creazione, 2013; Jerusalem, 2014; The Evolving European City, 2015; Ultima Sicilia, 2016. His solo exhibitions include: Diaframma, Milan 1974; Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Modena 1975; Studio Marconi, Milan 1983; Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt 1986; Biennale di Venezia, 1992, 1993, 1997, and 2004; Hunter College, New York 1997; Ikona-Magazzini del Sale,

Venice 1998; Fondazione Stelline, Milan 2005; Palazzo Sarcinelli, Conegliano 2005; Bugno Art Gallery, Venice 2006; Museo Civico, Padova 2007; Triennale di Milano, 2000, 2009, and 2011; Acireale and Sondrio 2010; Fachhochschule, Potsdam 2012; Galleria Luigi Ghirri, Caltagirone 2012; Villa Necchi Campiglio, Milan 2012; Chiesa Santo Spirito, Cesena 2013; Museo San Francesco, Republic of San Marino 2013; Castello di Vignola 2013; Galleria San Fedele, Milan 2013 and 2014, Museo Diocesano, Milan 2015, Urban Center, Milan 2017. He founded and edited series of photography books for various Italian publishers. For his twenty-year collaboration with magazines (Lotus, Domus, Casabella, Abitare) and national and international institutions (IBA Berlin, Triennale Milano, Biennale di Venezia, CCA Montreal) the University of Palermo awarded him a degree honoris causa in architecture on 25 October 2005. In 2006, Professor Italo Zannier awarded him with the Premio Friuli-Venezia Giulia for Photography. In 2010, his Nascosto in prospettiva was shown at the Expo Shanghai. In 2012, he received the Premio Ischia for Architectural Photography. He has taught at the Faculty of Architecture and the Faculty of Technology in Palermo, the Faculty of Humanities in Parma, the Faculty of Design in Milan, the Architecture Department in Cesena at the University of Bologna and is currently lecturing on the theory and history of photography at the IULM and the NABA in Milano.

Roberto Cremascoli

Mirko Zardini

Roberto Cremascoli is an architect, curator, publisher, and co-founder of COR Arquitectos in Porto. Among the studio’s recent works are the renovation of Grande Hotel do Porto and Fábrica da Resinagem at Marinha Grande. He curated the exhibitions Porto Poetic, at the Triennale di Milano (2013), and Álvaro Siza, Inside the Human Being at MART in Rovereto (2014). In 2016 he was co-curator of the Portuguese Pavilion at the 15th Venice Biennale of Architecture.

Mirko Zardini is an architect, author, and curator and has been the director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture since 2005. His research engages with contemporary architecture by questioning and re-examining assumptions on which architects operate today. Zardini was editor for Casabella from 1983 to 1988 and Lotus International from 1988 to 1999, and he has taught design and theory at architecture schools including Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, Princeton University’s School of Architecture, Swiss Federal Polytechnic University (ETH) at Zurich, and the Federal Polytechnic at Lausanne (EPFL).

Graphic Design Andrea Lancellotti Digital and post-production Mario Govino, GM Studio A sincere thanks to the authors, Àlvaro Siza Studio (Anabela Monteiro and Chiara Porcu), Cremascoli Okumura Rodrigues Arquitectos Studio and Ultreya for the valuable contributions