The China Design Museum Opens, and Its Architect, Álvaro Siza, Hides Strength in Stillness

His buildings look like "a cat dozing in the sun," yet they answer the cold, headlong pace of global consumerism.

Álvaro Siza, now 85, is not a man who seeks the main stage. Only back home in Porto does the architect look entirely at ease. You can spot him in a street-side café working on a sketch, a pack of cigarettes always within reach.

In an interview with The New York Times, Siza once said: "For me, the greatest pressure comes from having to do everything very fast. Some people think computers can help us work faster, but they cannot think for us. The time it takes to quiet down and think has never changed."

That out-of-step rhythm runs through everything Siza's buildings say.

In 2008 the Iberê Camargo Foundation museum was completed in Brazil. In many ways it was an ideal project for him. The country holds a strong emotional pull for Siza: Brazil is his father's birthplace, and its early embrace of modernism and its streak of hedonism have always drawn him. It feels much like Portugal, only freer.

Siza worked that sense of freedom and looseness into the building inside and out. As in his earlier work, the museum's narrative is measured and calibrated exactly, so that a visitor's field of vision shifts slowly on the way through: walking the narrow path toward the entrance, your eye catches a low, winding eave line, its continuity broken by a small sunken courtyard, until you keep going; walkways that reach out from the interior break away from the main structure and cross the building's surface like arms, so that by the time you stand in the courtyard at the entrance they seem to be holding you; deeper inside, long finger-like passages wrap around the courtyard and link the exhibition spaces on every floor.

Siza also saw the design as "a way of stretching time," letting visitors slow down and turn over what they had just felt. Windows are set into the sides of the building and into these "arms," bringing views and light from different angles to people walking the corridors — only as the visit ends does the building open out into its full shape.

"Should I accept more of what the age we live in offers me? But I don't think that would be a good answer for improving how people live." That is Siza's question.

So he uses his buildings to propose a gentler path, an alternative one. This slow, graceful idea of architecture is also his answer to the cold, headlong pace of global consumerism.

On April 8 the China Design Museum, designed by Siza, opened in Hangzhou. It gathers the vocabulary typical of his work: simple, pure, flowing lines, and a deft assembly of geometric parts. The plan as a whole is a triangle, which fits the long, narrow strip of land the school already had while giving the building a tension of its own.

The outer walls are mainly Angolan red sandstone with French yellow sandstone. Colors this bright are uncommon in Siza's earlier buildings, but in this setting they answer the lawns and trees around them and the deep blue sky the building cuts into. Wide glass windows on the roof and the sides of the museum bring daylight and the view outdoors into the interior.

Inside, Siza again used the white he loves, which makes the whole space feel cleaner and more open. Complex geometry and brisk, clean lines produce a fluid, changeable spatial form, each part answering a different function of the museum: besides the permanent and temporary galleries there are workshops for children and teenagers, a document center, a café, a rooftop garden and a design bookstore.

The Pritzker Prize once described this command of line by saying that "every line and curve has its own skill and reliability."

Siza's work with the China Academy of Art began six years ago. The idea started when a collection of Western modern design built around the Bauhaus moved from Germany to the academy; the aim that followed — to "start from a 'migrating Bauhaus' and systematically curate and present research-driven exhibitions of modern and contemporary design" — formally set the museum's construction in motion. Siza was thought the right person to design it.

In 1954, still a student at the University of Porto School of Architecture, Siza had already finished his first building: four houses in Matosinhos, the town south of Porto where he was born. The same year, he opened his own architecture studio in Porto. His projects since then run to hotels, schools, factories, churches, museums and apartment buildings, most of them in his native Portugal, others elsewhere in Europe and in Asia.

In 1992 Siza became the 14th winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. The citation said his buildings "show respect for many things: for the traditions of Portugal, with materials and shapes that look old and worn by time; and for the local setting and the structures already there."

That style owes much to the Portuguese modernist architect Fernando Távora. Between 1955 and 1958, Siza, once Távora's student, became his working partner. Távora's practice deepened Siza's grasp of Portuguese building tradition and taught him that creative work means something only when it stands in the present — that is, when the making of a building is thought out for its own time and place.

Projects set against familiar, intimate backgrounds became Siza's early proving ground. Matosinhos is a typical Portuguese town, facing the Atlantic to the north, its shoreline covered with rocks scoured by the waves. How to settle a new building into the local landscape was a question Siza was already asking the day he entered the profession.

The Boa Nova Tea House was a project Távora won in a competition held by the Portuguese municipal council in 1956. After choosing a cliff on the Matosinhos coast for the site, Távora handed the work to Siza.

Only after studying the site's weather and tides, the plants and rocks already there, and the building's relationship with the city and streets behind it did Siza start on the layout. First he held down the tea house's overall height, to avoid clashing with a nearby chapel and to keep a connection with the level of the sea. The dining room on the west side and the rooms on the south were built on the rocks at the water's edge, joined by a double-height atrium and a staircase. The tea room and the restaurant, the two main areas, open slowly around the bay into a butterfly-shaped plan; the tea room sets large windows on an exposed concrete base, while the restaurant is walled entirely in glass and opens onto the high ground outside.

To match the tones of the sea and the rocks, the Boa Nova Tea House takes a grey-white as the main color of its walls, and the roof is built from concrete-and-timber panels laid with Roman terracotta tiles.

Siza worked in one more clever detail: the window frames in both rooms slide down below floor level, and at that point the projecting eave joins the ceiling directly. In summer you can walk straight from the restaurant to the sea, and the building seems to disappear.

In 2004 Siza renovated the Boa Nova Tea House. It became a restaurant with Rui Paula as head chef, but kept the character of the original building.

Finished in 1966, the Leça Swimming Pools were still a popular place to escape to half a century later. Like the Boa Nova Tea House, the complex sits between the Atlantic and the walkway along the coast. Siza again used concrete as both material and color, a mark of respect for the rock-strewn natural shoreline. The complex holds changing rooms, a café and two pools, one designed for children and one for adults. Both run straight out toward the sea; the adult pool, the closer of the two to the water, is ringed by a low concrete wall with natural rocks scattered along its edge. From almost every angle its water looks level with the sea beside it, as if it had merged into the vast Atlantic.

Before stepping into the pools, visitors follow a corridor to the showers and changing rooms, where coarse concrete walls block the traffic behind them and the sea in front. The eye cannot reach the water, but the sound of it is unmistakable. In this way the passage from road to ocean is fully caught in what the body senses inside the building.

This way of designing out of the local context later became the signature style of Siza's career. Eduardo Souto de Moura, his student and a fellow architect, once described his buildings as "a cat dozing in the sun," lying there in the most natural posture there is.

After the Revolution of the Carnations in 1974, Portugal came out of decades of dictatorship under Salazar. Siza then turned to large public housing schemes. To meet the severe housing shortage that followed the revolution, he took on the Serviço de Apoio Ambulatório Local (SAAL) housing project. Porto's historic center was thought of at the time as filthy, run-down and packed with people. Within that limited space Siza tried to work out a new form of social housing. He built two rows of four-story duplex units meant to give residents generous room indoors. Small gardens line both sides of the shared courtyard and put some life into the place.

For Quinta da Malagueira, the affordable housing built for Évora in southwestern Portugal, Siza chose not to raise multi-story blocks in the fragile landscape around the city, and proposed instead to "spread the project across two sites made up of low, terraced courtyard houses." The layout therefore had to follow the rolling ground, so that the narrow cobbled streets the houses stand along always run with the slope.

One of the most striking things about the project is that water and electricity inside the housing area travel through a raised network of pipes and conduits — a fairly bold attempt in the 1970s.

These projects began to win Siza recognition abroad. He went on to take charge of social housing and urban development outside Portugal: in the 1980s, for instance, the Bonjour Tristesse building in Berlin and the Punt en Komma project in The Hague. Both pointed at the same question: what feelings and what uses can city buildings create for people? Siza's work offered an answer to that question, and to a city's changing face.

After the Second World War, modernist architecture dominated the international scene. That style, with its stress on reason and function, shaped many architects of the period, Siza among them. His own work is often called "poetic modernism."

Buildings from Siza's hand tend to be plain and clear, and they treat light as a natural building material. In fact, the simpler a design looks, the more complicated its making turns out to be on close inspection. To bring in a gradient of shadow, Siza adds overhanging planes to the exterior — several sides of the China Design Museum show this; and to carry light indoors, working out how light will shape the space calls for a grasp of the whole, and for trial after trial.

The church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Lande in Rennes, France, is one of the newest buildings from Siza's practice. With nothing but white concrete and light, he shaped a space full of artistry and mystery. A square platform floats above the chapel, its edges parallel to the axis of the seating. The platform regulates the light taken in through a skylight and bounces it around the interior off the ceiling and the curved walls. Two smaller skylights, one above the statue of the Virgin and one above the baptismal font, drop light straight into the room.

The light inside the church is thus made to cross over itself, and to hold layers.

Siza is known for modernist buildings, but that does not mean tradition is absent. In his work, traditional and modern elements merge everywhere you look.

Designing the garden and the internal passages of the Galician Centre of Contemporary Art (Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea), Siza drew on the region's ancient irrigation systems to form zigzagging ramps and flights of stairs. The idea came from an 18th-century map, from which he learned how a monastery had laid out its space — and that built a link to the historical context modern art sits in. It is also why the Pritzker Prize called his buildings "an extension of the principles and the beauty of modernism."

In 1986 the Italian architecture and product design magazine Casabella judged Siza's continuing experiments in architecture this way: "Inside Siza's spaces you feel clearly that a real design adventure is unfolding. Siza accepts the danger that comes with it — he can even bring back, inside his buildings, the thing people fear is going extinct: the heroic spirit of modern architecture."

His adventure is still going on today.

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