SANTA MONICA, CA.- The Santa Monica Museum of Art presents Álvaro Siza/Architect: Drawings, Models, Photographs, the first museum survey in the United States to explore the visionary fifty-year career of preeminent Portuguese architect and Pritzker Prize winner Álvaro Joaquim de Meio Siza Vieira. Revered outside of the United States and within the architecture profession worldwide, the exhibition introduces Siza’s work to a broader audience in this country. Siza himself will design the exhibition, comprising five major projects and forty original travel sketches. His long-time colleague, collaborator and friend, the noted architect Carlos Castanheira, will direct the onsite installation. Distinguished architectural historian, Jean-Louis Cohen, Sheldon H. Solow Professor in the History of Architecture at the Institute of Fine Art, New York University, will write the accompanying catalog text.

One of the greatest architects of our time, Álvaro Siza’s eloquent body of work is testimony to his belief that “Architecture is an art.” His inspired understanding of spatial relationships, considerations of scale, sensitivity to material and texture and use of light as an expressive and active element transforms the natural and built landscape with depth and originality. Siza often selects the simplest of materials—stucco, tile, wood and marble—to create buildings that are sublime, joyful and timeless, places of subtlety, balance and humanity. Speaking of his process of working with nature, Siza remarks in his conversation with Philip Jodidio in Álvaro Siza (Taschen) “there must be a certain distance between the natural and the man-made. But there must also be a dialog between the two….The important thing is how this geometry encounters the natural elements, and how the landscape is transformed.” In working with the pre-existing built environment, Siza seeks to integrate past and present, “not from a removal of historical references, but from an attempt at creating a synthesis.” The resulting buildings are modern yet appropriate, natural additions in harmony with their neighboring structures. Siza’s commitment to the buildings he creates extends to the furnishings and fixtures—door and window handles, light fixtures, stair railings, even ashtrays—that he designs and fabricates wherever the situation will permit. “Ephemeral things are not dead things,” Siza notes. “They stay in the memory, or they influence somebody else.”