In the wooded park of the Serralves Foundation in Porto, Álvaro Siza has extended the museum he completed in 1999 with the three-storey Álvaro Siza Wing, an angular white volume slotted between the trees.
Serralves Park runs down a slope on the western edge of Porto, and the museum Álvaro Siza finished there in 1999 has always been arranged around the trees rather than through them. The new wing keeps the habit. It branches off the existing building at an angle, three storeys, slotting into the gaps in the canopy, and from above it reads as another white arm laid across the green.
The structure is reinforced concrete with cork insulation, finished outside in white-painted plaster. A band of grey granite panels wraps the base of every wall, where rain and shoes do their damage. The volumes fold rather than curve. Set against the pines and the flat Atlantic light of the north, the walls work like a screen: at midday the shadow of a branch is the only ornament, at dusk one window burns orange in an otherwise blank plane.
An elevated gallery bridges over an outdoor walkway to link the wing to the museum, so visitors cross above a path they could just as well be walking on. "The new building maintains a perfect relationship with the building complex," the Serralves Foundation said. Inside, white plasterboard lines the walls, geometric boards on the ceilings diffuse the artificial light, and a continuous slot of daylight runs where wall meets ceiling. Floors are pale wood in long boards. The stairs are marble, treads and walls both.
Openings are rationed and odd. A triangle points down through a wall to a fragment of tree; another, floor to ceiling, opens the corner of an empty room. Nothing is centred. The galleries are sized for hanging drawings rather than for spectacle, which is the point. One floor holds the Serralves archives and two hold exhibitions, and the larger share of the new space went to the reserves rather than to the display rooms.
"This museum deserved to overcome the limitations of space that constrained its capacity for artistic dissemination," said the foundation's CEO Ana Pinho. The wing opened with C.A.S.A., short for Coleção Álvaro Siza Arquivo, a show working through the meanings of the word house, alongside Improbable Anagrams, a permanent display of the foundation's archives. "The Álvaro Siza Wing was built to be a house for the collection," the foundation said. C.A.S.A. ran from 24 February to 24 August 2024.
Siza has been building on this estate for a quarter of a century: the museum in 1999, the Manoel de Oliveira Cinema House in 2019, a gardener's house and the restoration of the art deco villa in 2021. Now, at ninety, he has added a building whose job is to hold his own drawings. Few people get to design the room their work will be filed in.
