Architecture Books – Week 23/2024
Sizing up Siza
This newsletter for the week of June 3 presents a new monograph on Álvaro Siza by photographer Duccio Malagamba and looks back to two Siza books: a guidebook on his buildings in Portugal and a GG monograph on his works and projects from 1954 to 1992. In between are the usual new releases and headlines — lots of headlines this week!
Book of the Week:
Before / After: Álvaro Siza by Duccio Malagamba, published by Phaidon (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop)
It is probably safe to say that Álvaro Siza, along with Alvar Aalto, Carlo Scarpa, Louis Kahn, Tadao Ando, and Peter Zumthor, among a few others, is an architects’ architect — an architect largely appreciated by other architects. This isn’t to say Siza’s buildings aren’t appealing to everyday people, but over his long career, since the Leça Swimming Pools in the mid-1960s, Siza has created numerous buildings that architects love to love. If we extend this label to books, monographs about architects’ architects tend to be coveted, scarce, and valuable. Remember how much Peter Zumthor’s Works and Thinking Architecture went for before he made another monograph and updated the latter? (If not, click those links.) Ever come across an old Carlo Scarpa book that doesn’t go for well more than its cover price? Although books about him are not uncommon, the same can be said about Siza, whose books are prized by architects who appreciate his distinctive, honest style of modern architecture.
This week sees the release of Before / After, the latest Siza monograph published by Phaidon, which previously put out a Complete Works in 2000 and The Function of Beauty in 2009. The latest book is a partnership, as much a portfolio of a photographer as it is a monograph on an architect. The photographer is Duccio Malagamba, who trained as an architect in Italy and then worked as an architect in Spain, but since 1991 he has devoted himself to architectural photography. Malagamba started collaborating with Siza soon after, in 1993, but his first exposure to his architecture was in 1984, he recounts in the book, when he was traveling Portugal with his girlfriend and he “found the most beautiful swimming pool I have ever seen in my life.” He is of course referring to the pools at Leça da Palmeira: two outdoor pools that seem to be naturally fitted into the rocky coastline rather than built atop them. Architects are not alone in their love of the pool — in 2006, forty years after they were completed, they were named a local landmark.
The Leça Swimming Pools fall at the end of Before/After, right before a conversation between Malagamba and Siza and following nearly twenty “white masterpieces,” as the photographer calls them, or “happy projects,” to Siza, who notices how Malagamba’s selection happens to omit the more difficult projects. The photographic documentation of nineteen buildings spanning more than fifty years is balanced by Siza’s distinctive sketches, often presented as a drawing on the verso page facing a photograph with the same or similar vantage point on the recto page. Readers can then trace the movement of the project from design to realization, from idea to reality. Project descriptions are brief — this is a Phaidon coffee table book, after all — so the images come to the fore as the way to “read” Before/After. Clearly, if the photographs were not accompanied by the sketches, the monograph would have taken on a different title.
The sketch/photograph presentation is one way that this is an architects’ architect monograph, though I’d say that the conversation between Siza and Malagamba is the most rewarding part of the book. “Conversation” is not entirely accurate, though, as it is basically Siza talking at length about the projects in the book; the talk took place when the pair flipped through a mockup of the book. Although the talk, titled “Looking Backwards,” falls on the last few pages of the book and therefore requires some flipping backwards to see what Siza is referring to, I think this location is better than if the relevant sections of text were moved to the projects themselves; there are narrative strands in Siza’s commentary, and the honesty of his words is best left intact rather than cut up and spread across the book.
One strand is care, which has become an architectural buzzword in recent years but, for an architect who has created beautiful public buildings on sometimes limited budgets, as in the swimming pools, the need for prolonged and nearly constant care and maintenance is paramount. Although Malagamba, like other architectural photographers, tends to capture the buildings just as they are completed, in an almost idealized state, the buildings soon age, settle, deteriorate, are vandalized, and are worn down by daily use. Without care and stewardship, buildings crumble, ending up as shells of their former selves or, worse yet, are demolished. Or, in Siza’s candid words, “In short, we end up with some unhappiness…”
Books Released This Week:
(In the United States, a curated list)
Agonistic Assemblies: On the Spatial Politics of Horizontality by Markus Miessen, published by Sternberg Press (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — An anthology on cultures of assembly that “stresses the relevance of small-scale and decentralized spatial formats of local knowledge production.” A project by Cultures of Assembly (COA) at the University of Luxembourg.
Architecture from Below: An Anthology by Sérgio Ferro, published by MACK (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — Ten essays written by French-Brazilian architect, theorist, and painter Sérgio Ferro that focus on the process of building. It is the first collection of his writings in English and the first in a series of three books by Ferro that MACK will release.
Brutal Wales by Simon Phipps, published by September Publishing (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — Postwar brutalist architecture in London may get all of the attention, but Wales has its fair share of rugged concrete, here captured by photographer Simon Phipps (see also: Brutal London).
The Edith Farnsworth House: Architecture, Preservation, Culture by Michelangelo Sabatino, published by Phaidon (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — Sabatino, director of the Ph.D. Program in Architecture at Illinois Tech, gives a comprehensive account of Mies van der Rohe’s famous Edith Farnsworth House. (Look for a review in this newsletter in the coming weeks.)
Housing: Strategies for Urban Redensification by Miquel Adrià, published by Arquine (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — A slim book by Miquel Adrià, architect and editor in chief of Arquine, full of provocations from the past for rethinking housing today. I included it in a roundup of books on housing in the Americas over at World-Architects.
Rage in Harlem: June Jordan and Architecture by Nikil Saval, published by Sternberg Press (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — This book tells the story of June Jordan, who teamed up with R. Buckminster Fuller to propose a housing scheme for Harlem following a 1964 riot; based on a talk given by Saval at Harvard GSD before he was elected a Pennsylvania State Senator.
Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.
Book News:
Two book reviews over at The Architect’s Newspaper: Owen Hatherley’s forthcoming Walking the Streets/Walking the Projects (Repeater Books) and Charles Holland’s recently released How to Enjoy Architecture (Yale University Press).
Common Edge interviews Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin on their latest, Atlas of Never Built Architecture (Phaidon).
A couple headlines on new books published by Routledge: Inside OUT: Human Health and the Air-Conditioning Era, edited By Elizabeth McCormick, and Architecture in the Indian Subcontinent: From the Mauryas to the Mughals by Christopher Tadgell.
Archinect gathered summer readings recommended by architects who were subjects of recent articles on the platform, though, not surprisingly, not all the recommendations are architecture books.
This headline contends that “architecture junkies will love [this] new book on funeral homes,” Preserved: A Cultural History of the Funeral Home in America by Dean G. Lampros, though it seems to me that fans of Six Feet Under would find it more rewarding.
STIR presents an excerpt of A Nocturnal History of Architecture (Spector Books), edited by Javier Fernández Contreras, Roberto Zancan and Vera Sacchetti.
If you can get behind the NYRB paywall, Martin Filler has two recent pieces: “Supersize That?,” on four books about skyscrapers, and “Up on the Roof,” on Machine à Amuser: The Life and Death of the Beistegui Penthouse Apartment by Wim van den Bergh
And, finally, two reviews of Cemal Emden’s forthcoming Carlo Scarpa: The Complete Buildings (a review will be in this newsletter next month, upon its US release): at Wallpaper* and at Building Design.
From the Archives:
Of the handful of books by and/or about Alvaro Siza that I reviewed on my blog*, the first — and probably my favorite — among them is Álvaro Siza Architectural Guide: Built Projects (Livraria A+A, 2017). I bought the book at an architecture bookstore in Zurich when it came out, even though I had no prospects of making it to Portugal to visit some of Siza’s buildings and have not done so in the seven years since. In addition to appreciating the work of Siza, the book edited by Maria Melo and Michel Toussaint grabbed my attention because of its wealth of information — more than 80 projects documented in photographs, drawings, and brief descriptions (in English and Portuguese) with location information and bibliographic references — and its design. The latter is highlighted by smaller sheets with color glossy photos, all by Nuno Cera, inserted into the book, one for each project. Such a technique may have been more common decades ago, when tipped in plates and the like were less expensive to carry out, but this century it is exceptional, in both senses of the term: rare and outstanding. Perhaps because of this design feature the cover price (around $50) is higher than a typical architecture guidebook, and maybe that also explains why the book is very hard to come by all these years later.
*The other four are Neighbourhood: Where Álvaro meets Aldo (Hatje Cantz, 2017), Opening Lines I: Siza Vieira and Housing and the City: Álvaro Siza and James Gowan (both Drawing Matter, 2018), and Imagining the Evident (monade, 2021).
One aspect of architects’ architects, for me at least, is that certain books about them are so scarce that when I come across one at a reasonable price I snap it up. That has happened at least twice with books on Álvaro Siza: once with Poetic Profession, the sixth issue of Lotus Documents, and once with Alvaro Siza: Works & Projects 1954–1992, a hefty paperback monograph edited by José Paulo dos Santos and published by Editorial Gustavo Gili, aka GG, in 1994. The cover of the latter, with silver lines on white background, signals that it is full of sketches alongside the usual photographs and hardline drawings; readers not familiar with Siza’s abilities can also see right away his adeptness at drawing figures, including himself in a mirror. Siza is known best for public buildings — pools, schools, museums, libraries, public housing, even factories — but the first of the book’s three chapters presents the lesser known houses he designed. Unlike other famous architects, Siza did not start with houses and move on to larger public buildings; he worked on them simultaneously, as the eleven houses completed between 1962 and 1988 in these pages attest. The other two, longer chapters present public buildings, one focused on Portugal, the other on other European countries. The documentation is incredibly thorough, but unfortunately the combination of numerous drawings and a page layout that elevates white space leads to floor plans, elevations, and sections that are far too small on the large pages. Introductions by Peter Testa and Kenneth Frampton round out the otherwise commendable monograph.
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— John Hill