Photograph by Fernando Guerra

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Álvaro Siza

Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza is a cult favourite among architects, so comfortably made our Hot List without being in the news a whole lot over the past year.

The biggest story to emerge was that the 1992 Pritzker Prize laureate was, at the age of 83, working on his first building in the United States. News of the project first broke in June 2015, so the designs were hotly anticipated when they were finally unveiled over six months later.

The architect also completed two major new buildings. The first was a red brick theatre in a village outside Barcelona, and the second was a renovation of a museum at a historic Portuguese monastery, which also included a new sculpture museum.

The latter was designed in partnership with Eduardo Souto de Moura, another Pritzker winner who is Siza's longtime friend and collaborator. The pair previously teamed up on the 2005 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, which incidentally also contributed to Siza's ranking.

We featured the project when we asked former gallery director Julia Peyton-Jones to share her memories of it as part of a series of videos about the pavilions over the years. She described it as a "hugely complicated" building that was "created as an evolution of the barrel-vaulted roof".


Top posts:

1. Work to begin this May on New York condo tower by Álvaro Siza

2. Álvaro Siza completes red brick theatre near Barcelona

3. Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura team up for Portuguese museum project

4. Siza and Souto de Moura's 2005 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion was "hugely complicated"

5. Álvaro Siza's first US project to be a luxury residential tower in Manhattan