Siza Design

“Siza Design – Recovering the Sense of Time”, held at Matosinhos’ Municipal Gallery, shows through his drawings the complex simplicity of Álvaro Siza Vieira’s design work.

“The drawing of a piece of furniture can’t be but definitive. There aren’t any fixed references concerning scale, environment or need.

There is the body, which transforms slowly enough to use an Egyptian chair. When the objects are stripped down, the history of a few forms remains. Imagination flies amongst those forms, at low altitudes if one doesn’t consider impatient apprentices. It is necessary to saturate the drawing with intimate security, serenity, a fragment of its own incompleteness, some instability, so it may receive something from what surrounds it – thus transforming itself; so it doesn’t come undone and so nothing comes undone, suddenly flooding space and falling back into anonymity. The perfect object would be a mirror without frame or finish – a piece of mirror – lying on the floor or up against a wall. In it, shortsighted person observes forms, moving shadows, reflexes of reflexes. That’s what drawing feeds off.”

So wrote Álvaro Siza Vieira, in 1992, in About the Difficulty of Drawing a Piece of Furniture. The complex simplicity of the most renowned Portuguese architect’s work – one of the great living figures of contemporary architecture, himself 80 years old and with a 60 years old career – represents one of the most demanded study objects amongst architecture and design lovers.

His drawings – the base of all his work – are now presented at the exhibition “Siza Design – Recovering the Sense of Time”, which will be held at Matosinhos’ Municipal Gallery. Promoted by Matosinhos’ City Hall, the exhibition is coordinated by the Culture Department of the City Hall and ESAD IDEA – Research in Design and Art (the research centre of ESAD – College of Arts and Design Matosinhos, integrated within the design Incubator that is operating at the Matosinhos Marketplace). The exhibition presents a comprehensive approach to the design works of Siza Vieira, ranging from furniture pieces, pottery, tapestry or jewellery, to luminaries, ironwork and equipment accessories, presenting a data sheet for each of the selected pieces that includes identification, description, materials, distributing company and photographs, also integrating a set of original mock-ups.

The exhibition bears the curatorship of Maria Milano and the consultancy of Roberto Cremascoli and João Machado, as a development of the book Siza Design, drawn by João Machado and published by Artebooks, with the support of Casa da Arquitectura and Ordem dos Arquitectos / Secção Norte.

01 / 03

Álvaro Siza Vieira, BoaNova

Álvaro Siza Vieira, Mecânica

Álvaro Siza Vieira, Serviço

February 21 – April 26, 2015
Siza Design
Recovering the Sense of Time
curated by Maria Milano
Galeria Municipal De Matosinhos
Avenida Afonso Henriques, Matosinhos

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Siza Design

“Siza Design – Recovering the Sense of Time”, held at Matosinhos’ Municipal Gallery, shows through his drawings the complex simplicity of Álvaro Siza Vieira’s design work.

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