Day #6 | Siza, you're my new favorite Architect!

Photo © Maral Berenjian

Today's good read was an article by Kenneth Frampton in Art Forum magazine, on the architecture of Alvaro Siza.

Alvaro Siza is a well-known Portuguese architect, whose works have been described as "poetic modernism." In the first decade of his career, he worked in the private housing sector and then moved into designing modern social housing. Frampton writes about, how at the age of 82 and around four hundred different types of projects completed, Siza still goes back to former social housing projects in the aim of improving living conditions for those who live there and in effect solving the issues of housing shortage in his own country. As a young architect I find this approach very honorable and inspiring.

Looking at the social housing projects that Siza has completed, you can really see that his goal has been to understand and meet the necessities as well as cultural values of users. For example, he was asked to reconstruct Berlin's Schilderswijk Ward, which had a large community of Muslims. Acknowledging user requirements in the architecture. He segregated spaces between males and females. Meeting this criteria with innovative sliding walls to divide internal areas and this solution also accommodates any future non Muslim tenants as well.

Why is this interesting and related to the work I am doing now? Well at the moment I am researching and designing a social housing module that can be potentially used in the Emirates. After reading this article and Siza's approach to these kinds of projects, I believe that as an architect if you want your designs to be award winning, you really need to put your soul into them. You need to be personally committed, to live and breathe like the users and try to put yourself in their position if you can.