Before / After: Álvaro Siza

Álvaro Siza turned 91 in 2024, and Phaidon has produced what amounts to a self-selected retrospective. The architect chose twenty projects from a career spanning seven decades, and each one is presented through two sets of marks: Duccio Malagamba's photographs, and Siza's own hand drawings. The pairing is central to how the book works. Malagamba has photographed Siza's buildings for thirty years; his images show the spaces inhabited, furnished, and lit as their architect intended. The drawings are a different kind of evidence: Siza's preliminary thinking made visible.

The twenty projects span Belgium, Brazil, France, Germany, Portugal, South Korea, and Spain. Pritzker Prize winner, RIBA Royal Gold Medal recipient, Praemium Imperiale laureate: the career honours are well known, but what the book conveys is the discipline of someone who has spent a lifetime making walls, light, and thresholds behave in precise relation to each other. Malagamba's training as an architect means he looks at space rather than surface, and the photographs read differently for it.

The selection mechanism gives the book a different character from the standard critical survey. These are the twenty buildings Siza considers worth returning to, not a curator's choice or a publisher's chronology. The drawings that accompany each project are working sketches, not presentation images, so the reader gets some sense of how a building was found rather than simply what it looks like finished.

At 320×240mm, 312 pages, and 330 illustrations, the format is larger than Phaidon's standard architecture titles. Wallpaper* called it "a hard-to-miss architecture book of pure aesthetic delight." Architectural Record noted that Malagamba captures "the architect's famously exacting work furnished, in use, and full of life."