SIZA TALKS 2022
Conversations with Time
Access (1 day): 5€, 50% discount to Serralves Friends, students and seniors.
Access (3 days): 15€, 50% discount to Serralves Friends, students and seniors.
Tradition is a challenge to innovation. It is made of successive grafts. I am a conservative and
a traditionalist, that is to say: I move between conflicts, compromises, hybridisation, transformation.
Álvaro Siza
As part of its continued commitment to architecture, in 2022 the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art will be hosting the fourth edition of "The Álvaro Siza Talks", an event that brings together architects, scholars and students for the discussion of issues relevant to contemporary architecture while celebrating the spirit of Álvaro Siza's work. Each edition of the Talks is centred around a different topic that aims at fostering discussion and debate in connection to themes and values expressed in Siza's architecture.
The theme proposed for this year's edition of the Talks, "Conversations with Time", explores the role of the passage of time both in the design process and in the life of buildings. Álvaro Siza's work, which itself spans more than six decades, reminds us that no architecture is strictly permanent or ephemeral, but constitutes a specific moment in a continuous chain of transformations. The history of architecture is also made up, as Siza states, of successive grafts that have left a series of traces in space and time.
The relationship between architecture and time is manifold and complex. On the one hand, every work of architecture is exposed to the passage of time, both through the action of man and that of nature. The life of buildings is extended over time both by means of successive extensions and alterations, which transform their spaces and their image, and by their own weathering and ageing. On the other hand, we are well aware, at least since Le Corbusier, that time is an essential part of the experience of architecture. Architecture – and particularly in Western culture – has often demonstrated a strong desire for durability, for permanence. However, on many occasions, it has been precisely some ephemeral constructions, such as exhibition pavilions, which, freed from many of the constraints usually involved in the development of a project, have become spaces for experimentation that have decisively contributed to the advancement of the discipline.
The work of the architects participating in this year's edition of the Talks encompasses the whole of this arc, ranging from interventions on historic buildings to various forms of ephemeral constructions.
The opening lecture will be delivered by David Chipperfield, and speakers include Alison Brooks (London), Carla Juaçaba (Rio de Janeiro), Momoyo Kaijima (Atelier Bow-Wow, Tokyo), Juan Navarro Baldeweg (Madrid), João Mendes Ribeiro (Coimbra) and José María Sánchez García (Madrid).
In addition to Álvaro Siza, the Scientific Committee of “The Álvaro Siza Talks” is composed of Eduardo Souto de Moura, Farrokh Derakhshani (Director of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture), Philippe Vergne (Director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art) and Carles Muro (coordinator of The Álvaro Siza Talks).
"The Álvaro Siza Talks" are organized by the Serralves Foundation in collaboration with the Aga Khan Award for Architecture.
Program
November 16
19:00 Opening remarks
19:30 Opening lecture by David Chipperfield
November 17
17:30 Alison Brooks
18:30 José M. Sánchez García
19:30 Momoyo Kaijima
November 18
17:30 Carla Juaçaba
18:30 João Mendes Ribeiro
19:30 Juan Navarro Baldeweg
The conferences will be in English, with simultaneous translation into Portuguese.
Mecenas das Siza Talks
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Photo: Ben Blossom
Photo: Benjamin McMahon
Alison Brooks
(Guelph, Ontario, 1962)
Studied architecture at the University of Waterloo before moving to the UK in 1988. Since founding her practice in 1996 she has emerged as one of the UK’s most inventive architects with works encompassing urban design and housing, higher education buildings, private houses and public buildings for the arts. She is the only UK architect to have received all three of the profession’s three most prestigious architectural awards: the RIBA Stirling Prize, the Manser Medal and the Stephen Lawrence Prize.
Alison Brooks has contributed to architectural education for over fifteen years as External Examiner for University of Central London, University of Bath, University of Lincoln and the Architectural Association. She taught a Diploma School Unit at the Architectural Association from 2008 to 2010 and served as External Examiner from 2016 to 2019. In 2018 Alison was appointed as the John T. Dunlop Design Critic in Architecture at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design.
In 2014 Alison was awarded an Alumni Achievement Award from the University of Waterloo, followed by a 2016 Doctorate of Engineering (Hon Causa).