The new volume in the series “from the Collection”, by André Tavares and Susanne Cotter, presents the documentary spectrum that makes up the Álvaro Siza Archive, recently integrated into the Serralves Collection.

Taken as raw material to build knowledge and generate a new understanding of Siza's work, the Archive reveals the incessant use of drawing as a working tool, the prefiguration of forms and spaces through sketch and technical drawing in a process of successive approximation to the desired result. But it also reveals various documentation — correspondence with clients, photographic records of places waiting for the works, opinions of the multiple actors involved in the construction processes, minutes of meetings and reports of tensions in the construction sites — which testify to an infinity of episodes that, despite invisible in the constructed work, contribute to the definition of a unique practice.

Álvaro Siza is one of the most emblematic architects of the 20th century, and one of the names with which Portugal is associated in any part of the world, winner of the Pritzker Prize in 1992. It was in 1991 that Álvaro Siza was invited to design the Museum of Art Contemporary by Serralves, which opened in 1999.

In 2019, he completed the architectural project for the Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira and in 2021 the restoration and adaptation of the Casa de Serralves. Maintaining, until today, a collaborative relationship with the institution and its programming.