Imagining the Evident

Imagining the Evident

Join us for the launch of the first English edition of Imagining the Evident with a conversation between Álvaro Siza, Francesco Dal Co, Kenneth Frampton, Peter Testa, and Daniela Sá, moderated by Barry Bergdoll.

Imagining the Evident is the book by the architect Álvaro Siza on his own work and process. Describing some of his projects, references and struggles, this book offers a significant contribution to the understanding of Álvaro Siza’s unique and highly influential approach to architecture, urbanism and design. A personal and fundamental testimony of one of the most celebrated living architects in a dialogue hosted by Columbia University GSAPP.

09:30 Los Angeles / 12:30 New York / 17.30 Porto / 18.30 Venice

This event will be held via Zoom Webinar, free and open to the public with registration. Organized by Monade Books in collaboration with Columbia GSAPP.

Register to attend via Zoom

Álvaro Siza is one of the most acclaimed contemporary architects, the Pritzker Architectural Prize laureate in 1992. His work is recognized for its particular attention to the location, austere beauty and definition in the smallest details. Siza’s oeuvre began in 1954 with the Boa Nova Tea House (1958-1963) and the Leça Swimming Pool (1961-1966), but his international recognition was only achieved in the 1980s, designing buildings around the world. He is a recipient of the RIBA Royal Gold Medal (2008), Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale (2012) and the Mies van der Rohe Prize (1988). His plan for the reconstruction of the center of Lisbon Chiado (1988), and designs for the Marco de Canavezes Church (1990-1996), Portuguese Pavilion (1994-1998), Serralves Foundation Museum in Porto (1991-1999), Iberê Camargo Foundation in Brazil (1998-2008) and the 611 West 56th Street Residential Tower in New York (2016), reveal a modern architect firmly rooted in ethics as in esthetics, with a practice of an extraordinary sense of rigor and freedom.

Daniela Sá, PhD Architect is a researcher and the Founder of Monade Books. Graduated in Architecture in FAUP, she lectured History of Modern Architecture from 2014 to 2019. Daniela Sá is the founding Director of Monade, editing and publishing internationally on Art and Architecture. She has researched on the archives of some of the most crucial architects in the XX century, such as Álvaro Siza, Paulo Mendes da Rocha or Oscar Niemeyer, conceiving and producing books as both author and editor. Among them are Museu Nadir Afonso / Álvaro Siza (2016), POROSIS / The Architecture of Nuno Brandão Costa (2017), Designed Future / Selected Writings by Paulo Mendes da Rocha (2019), Imagining the Evident”, by Álvaro Siza (2021) and *CIVITAS / São Paulo (2018), with which her work as editor was recognized with the shortlist for the DAM - Architectural Book Award 2019.

Peter Testa is a Partner at Testa & Weiser Architects based in Los Angeles and Senior Design Faculty at SCI-Arc. His work has been exhibited worldwide and is part of public collections including the permanent collection at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA). His writing is widely published in architecture, art, and design journals. Previously he was Associate Professor of Architecture at Columbia University GSAPP (1990-96) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1997-2002). He was appointed Visiting Design Critic at Harvard University GSD, and Esherick Professor of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. Honors include the MIT Innovation Award, the Municipal Art Society of New York Architecture Award, and the Design Arts Award of the National Endowment for the Arts. Prior to founding his firm, he collaborated with Álvaro Siza on buildings and projects in Europe and the United States. In 2018 he was a Scholar in Residence at the CCA where he guest-curated the Siza archive as part of the Find and Tell program.

Francesco Dal Co is an architect and historian and the Director of Casabella, Director of the Department of History of Architecture of IUAV. He graduated in 1970 at the University IUAV of Venice, and has been director of the Department of History of Architecture since 1994. He has been Professor of History of Architecture at the Yale School of Architecture from 1982 to 1991 and Professor of History of Architecture at the Accademia di Architettura of the Università della Svizzera Italiana from 1996 to 2005. From 1988 to 1991 he has been director of the Architectural Section at the Biennale di Venezia and curator of the architectural section in 1998. Since 1978 he has been curator of the architectural publications for publishing House Electa and since 1996 editor of the architectural magazine Casabella. He is currently Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies of the National Gallery of Art, scholar at the Getty Center, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Society of Architectural Historians. He is also a member of the National Academy of San Luca.

Kenneth Frampton, Ware Professor Emeritus at Columbia GSAPP, is one of the leading theorists and critics of architecture. To him, we owe some of the most influential regards on Architecture in the twentieth century to the present day. He is the author, among other books, of Modern Architecture: A Critical History, a classic of historiography translated worldwide, Studies in Tectonic Culture (1995), American Masterworks (1995), Le Corbusier (2001), Labour, Work & Architecture (2005), A Genealogy of Modern Architecture: Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form (2015), and L’ Altro Movimento Moderno (2015). The expanded fifth edition of Modern Architecture: A Critical History was published in January 2020, constantly challenging architectural paths.

Barry Bergdoll, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History and Archaeology Department Chair at Columbia University. His broad interests center on modern architectural history, with a particular emphasis on France and Germany since 1750. Trained in art history rather than architecture, he has an approach most closely allied with cultural history and the history and sociology of professions. He has studied questions of the politics of cultural representation in architecture, the larger ideological content of nineteenth-century architectural theory, and the changing role of both architecture as a profession and architecture as a cultural product in nineteenth-century European society. In exhibitions at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and at the Museum of Modern Art, where he served as Philip Johnson Chief Curator from 2007 to 2013, Bergdoll has offered a series of exhibitions intended to offer more inclusive visions of subjects from Mies van der Rohe (and his relationship to garden reform and landscape), the Bauhaus, Henri Labrouste, Le Corbusier, Latin American post-war architecture, and most recently Frank Lloyd Wright.