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Release Novembro 2024.

Gramaxo Foundation and Rachadouro Cloister of Alcobaça Monastery

These are architectural books. Their entire structure characterises them in this way. They have good, enlightening interviews — which I enjoyed reading — critical texts, sketches, drawings and technical drawings. I don't want to — and can't — say anything about this. I don't like ploughing into other people´s fields.

But I welcome the editor's idea: to invite two proven photographers to work on the projects, even if it's not exactly architecture photography that we know them best for. I challenge them to prove that the best can do anything. And well.

Teresa Siza

On site: Siza office
"The office of Álvaro Siza, as I first came to know it in 1985, occupied a U-shaped wooden pavilion hidden behind a non-descript office block on Rua d’Alegria near the center of Porto. At that time, we were five or six young collaborators working at an ad-hoc collection of drafting tables. There was no receptionist, secretary, cellphones, internet, computers, plotters, or any of the things that make up the contemporary office landscape. This was a space overflowing with restlessly energetic drawings, marvelous sketches across blueprints, cabinets bursting with precise ink drawings on fading vegetal pa- per, wooden crates in the hall from some far-off exhibition – the accumulation of years of work. Siza did not have a set workspace but was, as I remember, always in motion – disappearing in a cloud of smoke".
Peter Testa, Gramaxo Fundation book

It is not a classic rehabilitation.
No. When I arrived in Tavira, there was a roof. I thought the building needed to keep that character. When I did the hotel in the Alentejo, it was nothing special. It was a farming village owned by some people who didn’t live there, but came to hunt. And they had a pavilion just for hunters and guests, and around it there was a cooperative village with the baker, the metalworker, the carpenter, and then it was kilometres and kilometres of space. And I realised that nothing should be thought of in isolation, which would be short-sighted, because it was very inter- esting precisely because of the atmosphere. And the atmosphere was created by the proportions and the materials – the textures, etc. So I made almost everything new in the same way as the old. It’s what you call a “pastiche” – I’m a real supporter of pas- tiche. That seems to be pejorative, but Távora taught me that it wasn’t. When I went to see the Pousada de Guimarães, there was a modern chimney on a roof and I said: “Professor, this has just been done!” “I did it myself.” “But this is imitating the old one.” “It is, and what’s the problem? Better a good pastiche than a poor original work.” I shut up and thought about it for a few years: the good pastiche. I was accused of pastiche a lot at Barrocal. My colleagues at the conferences were indignant: “How could you do that?” But they are also intelligent, and friends, and they went to bed and all wrote to me: marvellous, there was no other way to do that, you did it very well! Carlos Prata did that to me. So I’m more and more inclined to recover as much as possible, getting closer to the original building if I can find the form and function of a time when it’s still there. It doesn’t have to be the 19th century. I’m more inclined towards that conservation of what already exists, roughly identical to what exists or not, rather than breaking in and doing things differently.
Eduardo Souto de Moura, Rachadouro Cloister book

“For you, when the work is complete, is the final look very important?
As a landscape architect, I would say that the final look, when the work is complete, is extremely important. However, even more important is what follows, the way that people appropriate the space and also how the space
has a life of its own. There is a very interesting book by John Dixon Hunt,
The Afterlife of Gardens — it’s a book from the mature phase of his life as a professor and landscape historian — in which he writes that gardens have
a life beyond the moment they are completed, and that is very interesting.
I know this from thinking and training, I know there is a life beyond the completion of works. I remember visiting two spaces that were fundamental to me: Versailles, by André Le Nôtre, and Sanssouci, the masterpiece of Peter Joseph Lenné, two essential creators in European landscape culture. I visited Versailles immediately after the massive destruction caused by the storm of 1999, which devastated fundamental avenues. I visited before and I visited after the replanting of those avenues. In the same way, I visited Sanssouci, just once, after the death of a row of trees that had reached full maturity: just over two-hundred years. The trees had died naturally and were being replanted. I remember visiting those two places at those two moments in time and thinking: ‘but when is a garden complete? When is a work of landscape architecture complete? Is it when planting finishes? Is it when the trees die? And if they die, are they replanted?’ There is no answer to that. So, to answer your question, it isn’t the case that a work is complete when we finish working on it, but rather when people start to appropriate it and when the space itself, the elements, some of which are living, start to grow. And then, when does the work finish? Is it when they are fully grown? “
João Gomes da Silva, Roman Baths of São Pedro do Sul book