https://www.flickr.com/photos/esadmatosinhos/albums/72157648303993023

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The drawing of a piece of furniture can’t be but definitive. There aren’t any fixed references concerning scale, environment or need. There is the body, which transforms slowly enough to use an Egyptian chair. When the objects are stripped down, the history of a few forms remains. Imagination flies amongst those forms, at low altitudes if one doesn’t consider impatient apprentices. It is necessary to saturate the drawing with intimate security, serenity, a fragment of its own incompleteness, some instability, so it may receive something from what surrounds it — thus transforming itself; so it doesn’t come undone and so nothing comes undone, suddenly flooding space and falling back into anonymity. The perfect object would be a mirror without frame or finish — a piece of mirror — lying on the floor or up against a wall. In it, shortsighted person observes forms, moving shadows, reflexes of reflexes. That’s what drawing feeds off.

So wrote Álvaro Siza Vieira, in 1992, in About the Difficulty of Drawing a Piece of Furniture. The complex simplicity of the most renowned Portuguese architect’s work — one of the great living figures of contemporary architecture, himself 80 years old and with a 60 years old career — represents one of the most demanded study objects amongst architecture and design lovers.

His drawings — the base of all his work — are now presented at the exhibition Siza Design – Recovering the Sense of Time, which will be held at Matosinhos’ Municipal Gallery, from February 21 to April 26, 2015. Promoted by Matosinhos’ City Hall and by ESAD, the exhibition is coordinated by the Culture Department of the City Hall and ESAD IDEA — Research in Design and Art (the research centre of ESAD — College of Arts and Design Matosinhos, integrated within the Design Incubator that is operating at the Matosinhos Marketplace).

The exhibition presents a comprehensive approach to the design works of Siza Vieira, ranging from furniture pieces, pottery, tapestry or jewellery, to luminaries, ironwork and equipment accessories, presenting a data sheet for each of the selected pieces that includes identification, description, materials, distributing company and photographs, also integrating a set of original mock-ups.

The exhibition bears the curatorship of Maria Milano (director of ESAD’s Master in Interior Design and responsible for one of the anchor-companies of the Matosinhos Marketplace Design Incubator) and the consultancy of architect Roberto Cremascoli and graphic designer João Machado, as a development of the book Siza Design, drawn by João Machado and published by Artebooks, company based on a partnership between João Machado Design studio, Try Now Digital Publishing and ESAD, with the support of Casa da Arquitectura and Ordem dos Arquitectos/Secção Norte. The book is complemented by an application available at the App Store.

The opening of Siza Design, on the 21st February, will be attended by Siza Vieira himself, architects Eduardo Souto Moura and Enrico Baleri, the State Secretary for Culture, Jorge Barreto Xavier, and the Commissary of the Portuguese Design Year, Guta Moura Guedes.

Siza Design is part of the official programme of the Portuguese Design Year 2014/2015.

For Álvaro Siza, projecting is not limited to drawing objects but also their contours: it means drawing the reasons that justify the project. The form is thus born within an acquired and settled culture that materializes yet in the act of doing, with seriousness and commitment. Drawing is a problem of time: enough time to decompose the problem, to undertake this great logic process that integrates architecture, product, client and matter; time to understand, gather data and attain results; time to find enough distance as to observe from afar; time to return to our original involvement, thus participating with emotion. Siza recovers the sense of time through objects that allow for a certain time gap between the action necessary to its usage and its delayed effect. Such is the case of the drawer handle that induces a delay in the very act of opening the drawer: two centimetres of cable equal idle instants.
Maria Milano, exhibition curator

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http://vimeo.com/121389482 Exhibition - Siza Design

http://vimeo.com/124826588 Design Versus Design

Créditos