Amazing that they can get a roof free of any vents or other typical roof elements.

Better cubism then new age formalistic thingamagic…

Did you realize the quality of the road pavement in the roof picture? Spectacular!!!

the project is really clever elegant and with a great control of the section and light.
Good exercise of simplicity and elegance.

Parabens!

…if you follow the fashion trends you are already out of fashion! Being creative is exactly doing what you desire and not be worried about the tastes and trends of some kind.

The overall quality of all their works is really good and unique somehow.
Being always in mies van der rohe prize finalists says something.

…these guys will one day win the pritzker prize…

Siza is Siza … and Aires Mateus is Aires Mateus .. is totally different things.
but one thing is certain, Portuguese architecture patent, elegance and a full symbiosis with the environment and image of the place and the city.
the purity of soul architectural portugese design my friends

tfa: so what you are trying to tell us from the photos you’ve posted is that using white render walls, skylights and monolithic volumes are trademarks of Siza that every architect shouldn’t be using in order not to be compared to him. alright.

what about oblique walls, glass façades, exploded spaces, oblique columns? hum… let me think of some stars that are all copying each other with out no one criticising them for it: Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, and so on and so on…They all started to copy Eisenman, but do you give a damn? No!

And what about this building looking like portuguese architecture? what could possibly be wrong with that?! There are only good things if you can visit a arch blog like this and figure out by yourself where the building is located without looking at the info. I’m sure that 90% of the cases you won’t be able to do that! Is it good to be like that? hell no. Generic architecture has reached its end some years ago. What we see now is just some last generic buildings that were on paper and needed to be built. There won’t be any place for generic architecture in the western world in 5 to 10 years. It will be a way for the western world to stand out from the emerging eastern countries.

tfa: I understand your point and frankly that brings us to a whole new subject of discussion. Whether Siza’s architecture is “typical” of a country and whether a country historically has a “typical” architecture. There are people doing PhDs about that, so it is a very complex matter.
Although simplistically I can answer to does 2 questions negatively. But at the same time We must admit that historically, Portugal never had the same architecture as Britain or even as France and even if you cross the border to Spain you will see that the architecture changes. It has to do with regional context, economics, culture, evolution, and so on. So you may ask: So why do I say that there isn’t a characteristic architecture of Portugal (or of any other country)? It is simply because countries frontiers often don’t correspond exactly to regional frontiers, to cultural distinctions. So that’s why you go to Granada and you have a whole Arabic architecture experience without getting out of Europe.
Even in Portugal, a small country, has a really diverse set of regions that changes the way people live and react. Therefore, over the years of the regime, there was a clear attempt to make Portuguese architecture the same from west to east from north to south. At that time the most prominent architect was Raul Lino who soon saw a nationalist interpretation of his work and began to see the whole country dressed up of white single story houses even in plain mountains where people have always built their houses with stones, not with clay.
In this way, I still can’t agree with you when you refer “characteristic architecture of Portugal” because there isn’t one. There are plenty. And the way Siza became so successful was precisely in the way he interpreted the local aspects of society and designed a specific building for that place. That is why his architecture is so diverse in typologies.
I agree that there is a degree of confusion of in order to make good architecture you need to compare yourself to Siza’s works, although this is really not the case with Aires Mateus nor with the majority of good contemporary portuguese architects. The one’s that spend all day trying to copy Siza’s elements they will never be good architects nor be recognized as so. But most of the times they’ll make good money though.

olá será que m poderia dizer qual é a morada exacta? sei
que é em Santo tirso, e qual é a rua? gostaria de visitar!
aguardo a vossa resposta,
obrigada

Well, the architectural language and materials are almost the same. The process is a little bit different, as they have their own method.