Álvaro Siza / Chapel in Zorkovac, Croatia
Karas Gallery
Praška 4
Álvaro Siza / Chapel in Zorkovac
10 - 31 May, 2009
Exhibition opening: May 10, 2009 at 10h
Chapel in Zorkovac
The chapel is located in Zorkovac, a village near the Croatian capital Zagreb. Its site is on the land belonging to the 18th century manor.
Its exterior shape is formed by a parallelepiped of 13, 30 x 6, 90 m floor plan and 8,90m height. The interior space is an 8, 00 x 5, 60 m nave, 8, 00 m in height, with side entrances. There is an altar on one side of the nave and the sacristy on the other side.
The chapel is surrounded by a 15, 75 x 21, 05 m terrace.
The concrete walls and 0, 25cm concrete slabs make load bearing structure. The interior walls are in raw concrete, while exterior walls are faced in 0, 30 m lime stone panelling.
The interior floors are in concrete.
The exterior joinery frames (double door giving access to the nave; a single door giving direct access to the sacristy; an opening by the altar and roof windows above the sacristy area) are in wood and partly glazed.
Two interior doors are also in wood and glazed.
The chapel interior furnishing includes altar, bench, chairs and a cross.
Álvaro Siza, Porto, April 15th, 2009
Alchemy of Drawings by Siza
To peer into the workshop of a master is an experience that disturbs and delights; it is almost impermissible. The opportunity to get a glimpse of the master Álvaro Siza’s workshop is an extraordinary privilege because he is an architect, sculptor and painter who continuously and obsessively draws; for him, drawing is a language and memory – a means to communicate with oneself and with others. Self-portraits, frequently drawings of his own hands while drawing; portraits of friends; landscapes and towns – most often his native Porto, Santiago de Compostela, Palermo; the architecture of others – Gaudi or Stirling; human figures; and finally, an intensive search for the ultimate form of his own projects are all means of communication, but also expressions of the pleasure of drawing. In his demanding and exhausting everyday work, drawing for Siza is the possibility to feel free and to relax. He likes to retell Aalto’s testimony on the importance of drawing. Namely, when a project was interrupted, Aalto would start to make drawings unrelated to the project; he would not think about the project, which frequently helped him to make progress on it.
Siza’s condensed and intense drawings, in which perspectives of object, details, and plans are intermixed, are all tools which establish a dialectic relationship between intuition and precise examination. The fragile balance of this relationship manifests itself in the series of drawings in which Siza searches for final expression of the chapel in the gardens of Zorkovac castle, in the middle of the forest landscape of central Croatia. These drawings are certainly not documentation of different phases of the project, but traces of everyday doubts, small steps, abandoning old decisions and making new ones.
The dense interweaving of lines that slide lightly across the paper shows simultaneousness of thinking – large form intermixes with a cross section of façade or a detail of roof water drainage. Ceremonial objects, entrance ritual, the way in which light is conducted can be recognized in layers, outlined one over another in such a way that there is an indication of the architect’s gestures during the creative process. In his variations of the interior, what is common is the presence of simultaneous clarity and mystery, not declarative but hidden dramatics, all that we love so much about Siza’s serene, existential architecture.
If the gesture of drawing contains unconscious memory, then the drawings of Zorkovac must inevitably remind us of another Siza church, of far greater scale and programmatic complexity – Santa Maria Church in the town of Marco de Canavezes near Porto. In the drawings of Zorkovac, the cross is frequently present, which is at the same time the Body of Christ, similar to the gilt cross which Siza created for the Portuguese church in a long-lasting artistic process. One of only few sacral buildings in Siza’s opus, it is also one of his most important works. One enters the spacious, high, white church nave, bathed in light, through ten-metre-high doors, inspired by the portal of the Monreal sanctuary in Sicily. Although the church is in accordance with the ideas of the Second Vatican Council, its layout does not have the democratism of a forum or arena, forms which Siza did not perceive as adequate for a meditative sacral space. Secularity and democratism are shown by an elongated window slit at the level of believers’ eyes. A synthesis of complete asceticism and almost gentle sensibility is achieved, which protects and inspires anybody who enters through the incredible, high ‘heavenly doors’.
All the works make one work in my head, these are the words by the master who in each new work continues to build his previous one, because: all my works are always with me.
Literature: Siza: Architecture Writings, Skira Editore, Milan, 1997.
Álvaro Siza
Born in Matosinhos, near Porto, in 1933. Studied at the School of Architecture, University of Porto, 1949–55. His first built project was finished in 1954.
Collaborator of Arch. Fernando Távora, 1955–58. Taught at the School of Architecture (ESBAP), 1966–69 and was appointed Professor of Construction in 1976.
Has been a visiting professor at the Ecole Polythéchnique of Lausanne, the University of Pennsylvania, Los Andes University of Bogotá and the Graduate School of Design of Harvard University.
Having been invited to participate in international competitions, he won the 1st prize in Schlesisches Tor, Kreuzberg, Berlin, at the recuperation of Campo di Marte in Venice in 1985 and at the renewal of Casino and Café Winkler, Salzburg in 1986.
Awards, selection: Award of the Portuguese Architects Association, 1987; Gold Medal of the Colegio de Architectos, Spain; Gold Medal of the Alvar Aalto Foundation; Prince of Wales Prize in Urban Design, Harvard University; the European Award of Architecture, the Economic European Community/Mies van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona; Pritzker Prize, 1992; Gold Medal, Nara World Architecture Exposition, 1995; Praemium Imperiale, the Japan Art Association, Tokyo; Venice Golden Lion, Biennale di Venezia,2002; Palladio d’Oro, Vicenza Town Hall, 2003; Royal Gold Medal (RIBA), 2009.
Doctor honoris causa: University of Valencia, 1992; École Polithécnique Federal de Lausanne, 1993; Palermo University, 1995; Menendez Pelayo University, Santander, 1995; Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería de Lima, Peru, 1995; University of Coimbra, 1997; Universidade Lusíada, 1999; University of Paraíba, João Pessoa, Brazil, 2000.
Member of the American Academy of Arts and Science, Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, AIA/American Institute of Architects, Académie d’Architecture de France and European Academy of Sciences and Arts.
