The fortune of the city is that it has never been perfect: Three days with Álvaro Siza documents a three-day conversation between Giovanna Borasi and Álvaro Siza that focused on his approach to understanding and designing cities. Through his reflections on working with historic sites and within existing frameworks, soliciting community needs and demands, and adapting his ideas locally, the conversation covers projects in Portugal, Spain, Macau, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, and the United States that show architecture and urban planning as integrated practices for intervening in a city across various scales. Rather than providing a comprehensive overview of his career and writing, the conversation celebrates Siza’s reading of the city as an “imperfect body” open to transformation. The conversation is supported by sketches and photographs, transcribed notes, and archival holdings from the CCA Collection including letters, newspaper articles, project commissions and competition proposals that capture Siza’s experiential way of understanding a place, its shape, its embodied history, and its life.

Editor: Giovanna Borasi
Editor-in-charge: Victoria Addona
Graphic design: Jonathan Hares
Co-published in English with Ruby Press and in Portuguese with Circo de Ideias