As a child, Álvaro Siza Vieira would already lift his head from books to glimpse what lay outside. Curiosity led him to drawing, in a constant attempt to transform into something else what fell short of the eye. “We are observing, but we see nothing,” says that same boy who, as a man, returns to books in an ongoing search for knowledge that must be fulfilled within a time that is increasingly finite.

After first falling in love with sculpture, he found himself in architecture, which allowed him to create the world as he saw it: a space of creation shaped by memory, dialogue, sustainability, and relationships. It was also through his work that he encountered others — whether a Turkish immigrant in a working-class neighbourhood in Berlin or a believer at the Church of Marco de Canaveses — in a continuous exercise against prejudice and indifference.

Revisiting a biography told in the first person, Siza Vieira, who was awarded the Pritzker Prize — the most prestigious distinction in architecture worldwide — reveals himself in a conversation that brings together the boy who grew up in a dust-free home, the man who lost his wife too soon, the professor inspired by the restlessness of younger generations, the professional who does not compromise his ethics nor accept everything he is told, and the architect — that enthralled creator — who never tires of seeking places of beauty and still dreams of what remains to be done.

Patrícia Reis was born in Lisbon in 1970. She studied Religious Sciences. She began her career at the weekly newspaper O Independente, later working at Expresso, Público, Marie Claire, Elle, RDP, and RTP. She is the author of several novels and some children’s and young adult books, with the collection O Diário do Micas bearing the seal of the Plano Nacional de Leitura. She is editor and curator of the award-winning magazine Egoísta and co-host of the podcast Um Género de Conversa. She has written biographies of Vasco Santana, Maria Antónia Palla (co-authored with the journalist), Simone de Oliveira, and Maria Teresa Horta, the latter published by Contraponto and awarded the Prémio Livreiros Bertrand para Autores Lusófonos 2024. At the beginning of 2026, she returned to fiction with O Lugar da Incerteza.