FOSCARINI ALLEGRO DESIGN BY ATELIER OI

FOSCARINI ALLEGRO DESIGN BY ATELIER OI

FOSCARINI ALLEGRO DESIGN BY ATELIER OI

Allegro is an entire family of hanging lamps that take on their shape thanks to the force of gravity, created with metal lines that design the light and emit sounds when they touch. The collection name is inspired exactly to this “musicality”. There are three versions, according to the finish of the metal elements, to express three different styles: Allegro Ritmico in black, Allegro Vivace in brown and Allegro Assai in gold. Their king size make them perfect to feature large public and private spaces, with a diffused downwards light that reflects off the ceiling.

Description Suspension lamp with diffused, direct and indirect light. The lamp consists of a chromed metal frame and epoxy powder coated full aluminium rebar rods. The rods are anchored to the mount using small metal rings. Fitted with three stainless steel suspension cables and a transparent electrical cable. Ceiling rose with galvanised metal bracket and glossy chromed metal cover. Designed to accommodate the separate lighting of the two light sources. Canopy decentralisation kit available.

Materials lacquered metal

Colors Ritmico black, Vivace brown, Assai gol

– Its raw material is the force of gravity, which has shaped its form. Its challenge is to use non-transparent material to create an interplay of light. Its name is inspired by the music that emanates from the aluminium bars as they brush together, moving freely in space.

– Is it a lamp, a musical instrument or an installation? It is all this and much more. Allegro is the result of the partnership between Foscarini and Atelier Oï, a trio of designer, architects and set designers, to create a work of art on an industrial scale.

– Allegro Assai, Vivace, Ritmico… with an endless number of compositions and opportunities for customisation. Alone or in a group, for a selected few or for the public at large. It is always the main focus, yet virtually immaterial. Another interpretation of light, in a Foscarini key.

http://www.foscarini.com/en/lamps/suspension/allegro.html

FOSCARINI

FOSCARINI

A company that gives form to ideas. A creative and technological workshop that conceives, develops and produces not only lamps but pure emotions, in collaboration with many other designers from around the world. A company that is free, passionate, unconventional and right at the heart of the industry in which it thrives. This is Foscarini.

01. INTRO

A designing and technological tour de force, Foscarini explores an entire world of materials and solutions. Their research atelier experiments, free of any mental barriers or technical restraints through flexible, efficient and high quality production, while the sales and logistics organisation distributes with equal care all over the world the smallest table lamp to the largest lighting set. Foscarini: a special personality in the world of lighting.

02. COMPANY

Foscarini’s headquarters are housed in an architect-designed, contemporary building in synchronize with its corporate mission to provide cutting edge design and sales service with logistics and warehousing providing total quality control.

In the mid 1990’s, Foscarini’s wish to provide design service to international markets led to a strategic move from the island of Murano to Marcon, on the Venetian terra firma. Here, they built a new facility, whose modern aesthetic is aligned with Foscarini’s creative corporate spirit.

With the same spirit that provides new ideas in lighting design, Foscarini also creates its own more efficient programs for customer and partner communication. For instance, My Foscarini, a proprietary IT platform allows 24/7 connectivity to current product availability, order placement and shipment tracking. 

In 1996 Foscarini obtained UNI EN ISO 9001 certification which guarantees the quality of all the company processes, from designing to production, to customer services. This Certification has been complemented since 2012 with the ISO 14001 Environmental Certification that confirms the company's commitment to continual improvement of its enviromental performances.

03. FOCUS

Why are Foscarini lamps so different from each other, yet share common concepts and values?

Foscarini focuses on developing new products but chooses only to put into production those that express new ideas. While inspiration is always valued, Foscarini’s development phase sometimes takes years of progressive research to analyze materials, shapes, processes and operating modes that sometimes lead to results drastically different from the initial concept. This is why Foscarini lamps are so innovative yet built to weather the whim of trends and become true classics.

04. COLLECTION

Over 60 models, more than 20 different materials and more than 30 designers come together to form a collection of individual lamps, each with a unique story to address a need with striking beauty.

With a surprising visual simplicity, often the result of complicated but concealed technology, Foscarini’s lamps have an impeccable logic that goes beyond the conventional and the commonplace. From its founding, in the early 1980s, Foscarini has stood out from other Murano glass lamp manufacturers because it did not have its own furnace. Not tied to a particular manufacturing process, Foscarini could pick, the most suitable supplier for each project in question.

This freedom led Carlo Urbinati and Alessandro Vecchiato, first as designers then as the company managers, to experiment with materials and processes other than blown glass. As a result, the collection could flexibly respond to a changing world as new materials and technologies became available

05. DESIGNERS

Design first and foremost. Thought before shape. The spirit of the project guides the choice of material. These are the distinguishing traits of a huge “work in progress” that teams up great maestros and young talents.

Foscarini has so many designs, both from young designers as well as established names, which have gained much notoriety. 

06. PROJECTS

Foscarini’s flexibility and desire to collaborate with designers have enabled it to develop custom projects by grouping their lamps in large numbers, responsive to the most diverse contemporary settings.

The company is willing to produce custom products, simply by changing standard finishes and compositions. Foscarini also devises specific solutions for large spaces in the form of light sculptures that are the result of the creative assembly of standard lamps. This has given rise to lighting events, including Fiber Evolution in collaboration with Marc Sadler and Tropico with Giulio Iachetti, which have travelled across the design capitals of Europe and the U.S.A.

This acquired experience led to the coining of a program called Foscarini Evolution to communicate the company’s ability to collaborate with designers and experiment with diverse materials and exploit the infinite composition potential of standard models to surprising effect.

07. CULTURE

Foscarini contributes to spreading and supporting design culture: from its sponsorship of the Art and Architecture Biennale in Venice, to the inclusion of its products in the collection of New York’s MoMA, the Milan Triennial Exhibition and a large number of other international museums, to the launching of new publishing initiatives.

The positive experience with Lux magazine, which from 2002 to 2008 was, the spokes piece for new ideas, materials and creative stimuli, led to the creation of “INVENTARIO – Everything is a project”. It is not intended as an advertising vehicle for Foscarini, but rather as a genuine magazine-book, directed by Beppe Finessi, architect and university lecturer and distributed on an international scale in the best bookshops and major museum bookshops. A free and illuminated look at the universe of design and the world we live in: design, architecture and art, it also contains strange life stories, analyses of objects created by nature and other freestyle topics.

Without feeling constrained, without ties to the Foscarini brand and its products: in the belief that everything that surrounds us, every moment we experience is a project to be shared with others. Through its support of INVENTARIO, Foscarini conveys its own values and looks forward attentively and curiously, to the pure pleasure of experimenting, innovating, creating: as always in the spirit of this company and of the people who work within it or with it every day.

http://www.foscarini.com/en/company/company-profile.html

‘’ For us work is never an individual endeavor and a creative path is never a solo journey.

 We always work in a team and everyone is part of a process. Thus, every single one 

of us has to be able to allow others space. ‘’

ATELIER ‘’ OI ‘’

AUREL AEBI, ARMAND LOUIS & PATRICK REYMOND

Atelier OI was founded in La Neuveville, Switzerland, in 1991 by Aurel Aebi, Armand Louis and Patrick Reymond. The name “oï”, which is derived from the Russian word troïka, a type of harnessing with three horses abreast, conveys the dynamism and holistic energy generated by a trio. Atelier OI is the result of an alliance rooted in humanity and art alike, it is about sharing values and ideals. The desire of the three founders to grow and to venture together on a journey that never denies the three individual histories is the intangible bond that has linked the trio for 20 years. The alliance brings together three open and creative minds willing to share their visions. No doubt, the three founders’ profound involvement with architecture, design and naval construction as well as the encounter with charismatic personalities such as Alberto Sartoris and Ettore Sottsass have shaped atelier oï’s philosophy. At the heart of this philosophy is the refusal to remain within the confines of a single discipline. At atelier  oï the idea of multidisciplinarity is epitomized by the word “ atelier ” which is a place of creation, of mastery of intellectual knowledge and manual know-how. On an international scale the work of atelier oï ranges from architecture and interior design to product design and scenography.

THE PROCESS

 “ The creative process is a continuum that has neither beginning nor end. 20 years ago we embarked on our journey whose routes and turns – regardless of disciplines or scale — have always been determined by the materials with which we work. The process is nourished by our life experience and our know-how, sparking chain reactions that in turn generate new discoveries each day. We wanted our journal to retrace this process and invite you on a cruise from our past work to our future destinations.”

PHILOSOPHIE CREATIVE

The creations of atelier  oï, always elegant and conceived with simplicity, express the yearning for a harmonic and natural unity. They aspire to epitomize a “po-ethic” vision of creativity, to bring the individual closer to the elements, to nature, to the material and to emotions. A rich palette of inspirations and elements supports the creative process: music, colours, light, scents and movement. And there is the possibility to drastically change a perspective, to make unexpected use of a given shape, to venture into the thousand and one facets of materials … The final purpose is to create a sense of pleasure and “ levitas ” by carefully addressing individual needs and to offer new narratives of quality of life in which ethics and reason are prominent characters. Never purist nor minimalistic and always skilfully realised according to the most rigorous standards atelier oï’s creations seduce by arousing emotions, memory, senses and conscience. Thus, they wish to provoke a mood, to touch the chords of wonderment and to awaken a sense of grace and harmony.

THE MATERIAL, AN ENDLESS SOURCE OF INSPIRATION

When bringing a new project to life, be it in architecture or in design, atelier  oï ’s first creative inspiration always stems from observation of the context. It is this context that suggests the theme around which atelier oï create and cultivate the content through a har - monious dialogue among different ele - ments. The starting point of the process is often the material: its nature, its potential af- finities, its reaction to external stimuli and its interaction with other materials. Understanding the nature of the context and the possibilities the material offers opens creative perspectives on the search of a harmony where the material itself can enter into a relationship and inter - act with more intangible elements like sound, movement and color. Therefore, experimenting is an essential aspect of atelier  oï’s approach: the ob - jects often spring from an intuitive and emotional rapport with the material. The material is explored, touched and turned with an indefatigable curiosity in the quest for knowledge and discovery.

SAVOIR-FAIRE

From the very beginning, the knowhow and skill that coalesce at atelier oï were the antithesis to a monoculture. The works are a celebration of diversity, a true fusion of disciplines that are often considered separate entities. This way of thinking and working intensi- fies the creative process, it expands the frontiers of imagination. New perspectives are opened and entirely new scales are possible. The elements of a project are allowed to become a source of inspiration from which something new can spring or be transformed and developed in a different context. Thus the objects vary in scale and in disciplines, and everything seems to be forever merging and emerging in a permanent metamorphosis. Fusion, the overarching theme at atelier oï, combines scenography, museography and expography. It is systematically integrated in atelier oï’s general process and applied to every single project. In each and every project you will find architecture, design and scenography without the slightest barrier.

http://www.atelier-oi.ch/index.php?id=28&L=1

THE CASA DAS HISTORIAS PAULA REGO DESIGNED BY EDUARDO SOUTO DE MOURA

THE CASA DAS HISTORIAS PAULA REGO 

DESIGNED BY EDUARDO SOUTO DE MOURA

THE CASA DAS HISTORIAS PAULA REGO DESIGNED BY EDUARDO SOUTO DE MOURA

The Casa das Historias Paula Rego was designed by the architect Eduardo Souto de Moura. The building makes use of certain aspects of the region's historical architecture, which is here reinterpreted in a contemporary way. It can be immediately recognised thanks to its two pyramid-shaped towers and the red-coloured concrete used in its construction.

The land and trees which previously existed at the site are incorporated as fundamental elements, while four wings, of varying heights and sizes, make up the building. The building itself is subdivided into rooms which lead into one another and are laid out around the higher central room which houses the temporary exhibition. The building's interior has 750m2 of exhibition space, on top of the technical and service areas, and is decorated in neutral shades and paved with the blue-grey marble of Cascais. The building also houses a shop, a café which opens onto a verdant garden and an auditorium with 200 seats.

The building's design is fully in keeping with the artist's wishes, and it was Paula Rego herself who was responsible for the choice of architect. It meets all the requirements for a museum and its various functions, without forgetting the need to give visitors a warm welcome.

 “With the Casa das Historias, it can be said that Eduardo Souto de Moura has adopted and almost ‘regionalist' approach, distancing himself from the modem abstractionism that has been a dominant feature of his work. It is, however, an uncritical regionalism, that avoids the sense of ‘resistante' which lay behind other attempts at the approach in Portugal in the 1980s. In this museum created for Cascais, Souto de Moura associates certain formal devices with a legacy of architectural composition, adopting specific formulas for the building's insertion in the surrounding area as well as a use of scale which can be easily contextualised in a very specific type of geography. Its close proximity to the work of Raul Lino is therefore set in a “Southern” landscape, without resorting to any unnecessary decorative or picturesque frills.”

 “With this museum, Souto de Moura develops a form of “modern-day architecture” without, in fact, repeating any of the “old models" - in keeping with the ideas defended by Aldo Rossi in his scientific autobiography - evoking timeless archetypes from urban iconography: towers, lighthouses, silos and chimneys, like the ones that define the profile of the Palacio de Sintra. It is therefore not surprising, if one continues the “analogy", that, when describing this museum, Souto de Moura also mentioned the pronounced roofs of Raul Lino's palaces, or the idea of an “inhabited chimney", evoking that of the kitchen in the monastery of Alcobaca_ In fact, in its best interpretation, the Casa das Historias can be seen as a “historicist" project, a condition that will certainly surprise Souto de Moura's most faithful followers and confound his harshest critics."

Some photographs had taken  by © Vítor Gabriel which you may find more to click Archdaily web page link.

http://www.archdaily.com/103106/casa-das-historias-paula-rego-eduardo-souto-de-moura

Some of others had taken by © Francisco Nogueira which you may find more to click below his web page link.

http://www.francisconogueira.com/work/casa-das-historias/

EDUARDO SOUTO DE MOURA LAUREATE ESSAY

Modern Project and Ancient Architecture

By Carlos Machado Professor of Contemporary Architecture, Oporto University

“The Modern Movement is a project and not a language. As yet, nothing has appeared to replace it. It is only the means that have changed. I think that Aldo Rossi was one of those who recovered components that had apparently been forgotten: History, which was implied, but never evoked.” Eduardo Souto de Moura

In considering the Modern Movement as a project, Eduardo Souto de Moura sets out to evaluate the coherence and applicability of its principles, seeking to identify those elements that are enduring. He then compares these principles with the history of architecture. In no way is he attempting a nostalgic return to the early 20th century, nor is he defending any supposedly heroic avant-garde theory based on the idea of permanent ruptures with the past. Rather, he is looking for correlation between building forms and techniques (their appropriateness or their necessity) and between responding to a program brief and demonstrating functional versatility. In each case, Souto de Moura is seeking to understand how formal structures endure over time, discovering their role in the transformation of territory and the reasons for their continued persistence throughout the history of cities.

Eduardo Souto de Moura and six other architects from Porto refused to participate in the exhibition After Modernism (Lisbon, 1983). Nevertheless, they wrote a joint text for the catalogue. Following a brief description of the characteristics of 20th-century Portuguese architecture, they reached the conclusion that there was nothing to be gained by discussing the future of Portuguese architecture from the perspective of contrasting the modern and post-modern, as the promoters of this later movement proposed. And yet, if there was a fundamental problem underlying all projects that Souto de Moura had undertaken until then, it was precisely the relationship of modern architecture with the past, or the “presence of the past”—the theme of the 1980 Venice Biennale that probably lay at the foundation for the After Modernism exhibition undertaken in Portugal.

“I have always understood the Modern Movement as a continuation of Classicism.” Souto de Moura said in 1994. “Basically, it is a discourse of continuity with different techniques and intentions, but with common underpinnings: proportions, the relationship between structure and form, a refined language.”

New means include industrialized construction systems, concrete and iron, the skeleton structure, etc., as well as abstraction, which is considered necessary for a non-figurative formalization of architecture, as a way of overcoming historic eclecticism. Hence, the acceptance of the hypothesis of a (modern) Architecture for Museums—the title of a text by Aldo Rossi that returns to Cézanne’s announcement of the need for an art whose meaning is derived from the confrontation with its past that only the organized temporal succession of museums enables us to understand.

Souto de Moura is only interested in a modern architecture that, just like the painting that Cézanne set out to produce, is “something solid and lasting, like the art of museums”. Consequently, he immediately understood from the very beginning, when working with Álvaro Siza, that for architecture, cities are in fact like museums, since they are places where different periods are all present at the same time. They accompany one another, overlap with one another, establishing crossovers and giving rise to the city as we know it. Our fascination with cities lies in the infinite variety of its possible correspondences, in both near and distant allusions, in the limitless possibilities for imports and intertwinings. They confront us with the different and even with the exotic. But it is a fascination that also lies in those similarities that seem fatal and necessary, arising from the universal human condition that, in a surprising demonstration of empathy, absorbs everything that is apparently strange or alien. It returns us to ourselves as the heirs of a way of living and giving shape to the things of life that is born with us, recognized as such through different times and places.

For Souto de Moura, this city/museum must be upturned and examined in all of its stratifications— produced by permanent confrontation and overlapping layers—to reveal a past that is also a presence. These successive accumulations carry, if not the material presence of forms and spaces, at least evidence or memories that are also an important part of the city as we know it today.

It is a clinging to the past that necessarily involves abstraction as a way of thinking, both as a way of seeing and as a formal result. “We must treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone”, said Cézanne to his disciple Emile Bernard—an aim that Le Corbusier returned to some years later in the first issue of L’Esprit Nouveau (1920) “All is but spheres and cylinders. There are simple forms that provoke constant sensations.” The same simple or elementary forms are found in Aldo Rossi’s first architectural designs, simultaneously abstract and evocative of the architecture of the past.

“Abstraction” and “the city as a museum” are therefore the two complementary terms that enable us to understand Eduardo Souto de Moura’s first works, in which he outlines some of the premises that will later remain with him as firm convictions and will be successively revisited and questioned throughout his career.

For him, abstraction is understood, just as it is by Cézanne, as something that is deduced through observation of the real. That, in turn, leads to a simplification of forms, enabling us to see, for example, cylinders beneath columns, just as Le Corbusier did when visiting Roman houses at Pompeii. Figuration in architecture of the past is replaced by proportion and geometry. It is an attempt to get at the essence of historic forms reducing architecture to its most elementary components, to its volumetric and basic construction principles: “The spirit manifests itself in geometry, proportions are the language of architecture” Le Corbusier also said (leaving in abeyance—as if it has been momentarily ignored—the problem of decoration that will find a variety of solutions in Souto de Moura’s work.) Proportion can be seen as a language, and geometry as a means of organizing space, a tool for rationalizing formal and spatial relations, encapsulating, as Álvaro Siza states in Imaginar a Evidência (Imagining Evidence), the project’s essential core—“Architecture is geometry.”

Abstraction and industrialized construction form part of a bipolarity that is always found in Souto de Moura’s work. It results from a permanent (case by case, work by work) evaluation of what is gained and what is lost with modern means, through a refined language, a skeleton structure, etc. In some cases Souto de Moura experiments with a return to old systems, such as the stone bearing walls of traditional architecture. In other cases, albeit in the form of an allusion or citation, he returns to the architectural orders and their decorative elements of mouldings, cornices and capitals. These were used, for example, as part of the competition project for the Office of the Secretary of State for Culture in Porto (1981-88) where the capitals by the lake were proposed as a support for a stage at the center of the garden, that was never built. Decorative elements were assembled as fragments in a collage, in the house in Boavista (1987-94). Stones from the old demolished house, with its mouldings and cornices, were inlaid in the long wall leading to the entrance to the new house.  We might also consider his design for the competition “A House for Karl Friedrich Schinkel” (1979), divided into two sectors, one abstract and the other figurative. The latter was designed as a false  ruin, with the invented remains of former decorative elements. Hence the permanent allusion to an absent, irrecoverable figuration, to those architectural orders that for so long had provided us with distinctly characteristic buildings. Hence the presence in all his works of a sense of loss, of incompleteness—a permanent allusion to the classical world in which structure and form came together to create a complete system, in which decoration played its own role in defining the form and character of buildings.

For all these reasons, or as a logical sequence of these same ideas, we witness Souto de Moura’s great attention to the entire context—to all of its existing features, ranging from what has already been built to the natural environment. He considers everything, from the garden to agriculture, from the natural relief of the terrain to the clumps of trees, to the watercourses and the supporting walls—everything testifying to the way in which the territory has been modified or built by human hands. Attention is paid to the singularity of places and landscapes, to the different scales of reality, to everything that, when seen in the reality of its form, is already the project. “The Louvre is a good book to consult,” Cézanne also said, “but it must only be an intermediary. The real and immense study that must be taken up is the manifold picture of nature.”

Souto de Moura considers topography to be one of his design materials. It is a conjunction of lines of force, suspensions and concordances, balances and imbalances, treated as the sustenance or starting point for an architecture in which figuration is unnecessary—or no longer possible. Plans and volumes are in relation to the surroundings and give rise to form—see for example, the Braga Stadium (2000-03), that clearly has parallels from this point of view with Álvaro Siza’s swimming pool in Leça da Palmeira (1961-66). Both designs begin with the great lines of the landscape (with very close and complementary relationships between what is natural and what is built). Both of them are simultaneously abstract and topographical, or territorial in nature.

Souto de Moura’s architecture is also intended to grow out of the construction, tending to make form and structure coincide with one another. “Identity of construction and form,” Ludwig Hilberseimer wrote in Großstadt Architektur (although this could also have been said by Mies van der Rohe) “is the indispensable prerequisite of all architecture. At first sight, both appear to be opposites. But, it is precisely in their close conjunction, in their unity, that architecture exists.” So, it is an architecture in which one is always confronted with the need to forestall the rift between architects and engineers. Take, for instance, the great circular openings in the Braga Stadium that optimize the role of the concrete slabs supporting the northeast stands. This idea was suggested by the engineers during the design phase in order to arrive at the most efficient structural solution, and later incorporated into the final version. Objective criteria are therefore sought to reduce arbitrariness. By working with constraints, Souto de Moura’s avoids being left with arbitrariness, form for form’s sake and whimsy as the only possible responses. Hence, the great attention he pays to the program—to the “functions”, as modern architects liked to call them—to solar orientation, and all the factors that make it possible to design a project without thinking about form. Souto de Moura is always seeking to get to the practical problem, and this is what precisely happens in his best projects.

In this context, the ruin takes on a special meaning as an artifact stripped of its most superficial figuration. It is a reduction of architecture to its formal principles, enabling the buildings to reveal their secrets more readily. It is as if ruins testified to the temporal and spatial unity of architecture.

You may visit the Pritzker Prize web page to read all essay of Modern Project and Ancient Architecture by Carlos Machado Professor of Contemporary Architecture, Oporto University to click below link and download in pdf format.

http://www.pritzkerprize.com/2011/essay

EDUARDO SOUTO DE MOURO

Eduardo Souto de Moura was born in Porto, Portugal in 1952. His father was a doctor (ophthalmologist) and his mother a home maker. He has one brother and one sister. The sister is also a doctor and his brother is a lawyer with a political career—formerly he was Attorney General of Portugal.

Following his early years at the Italian School, Souto de Moura enrolled in the School of Fine Arts in Porto, where he began as an art student, studying sculpture, but eventually achieving his degree in architecture. He credits a meeting with Donald Judd in Zurich for the switch from art to architecture. While still a student, he worked for architect Noé Dinis and then Álvaro Siza, the latter for five years. While studying and working with his professor of urbanism, Architect Fernandes de Sá, he received his first commission, a market project in Braga which has since been demolished because of changing business patterns.

After 2 years of military service he won the competition for the Cultural Centre in Porto. The beginning of his career as an independent architect.

He is frequently invited as a guest professor to Lausanne and Zurich in Switzerland as well as Harvard in the United States. These guest lectures at universities and seminars over the years have afforded him the opportunity to meet many colleagues in the field, among them Jacques Herzog and Aldo Rossi.

He is married and he has 3 daughters: Maria Luisa, Maria da Paz e Maria Eduarda. His wife, Luisa Penha, and the eldest daughter are architects.

Along with his architecture practice, Souto de Moura is a professor at the University of Oporto, and is a visiting professor at Geneva, Paris-Belleville, Harvard, Dublin and the ETH Zurich and Lausanne.

Often described as a neo-Miesian, but one who constantly strives for originality, Souto de Moura has achieved much praise for his exquisite use of materials—granite, wood, marble, brick, steel, concrete—as well as his unexpected use of color. Souto de Moura is clear on his view of the use of materials, saying, “I avoid using endangered or protected species. I think we should use wood in moderation and replant our forests as we use the wood. We have to use wood because it is one of the finest materials available.”

In an interview with Croquis, he explained, “I find Mies increasingly fascinating ... There is a way of reading him which is just to regard him as a minimalist. But he always oscillated between classicism and neoplasticism ... You only have to remember the last construction of his life, the IBM building, with that powerful travertine base that he drilled through to produce a gigantic door. Then on the other hand, he arrived in Barcelona and did two pavilions, didn’t he? One was abstract and neo plastic and the other one was classical, symmetrical with closed corners ... He was experimenting. He was already so modern he was ‘post’.”

Souto de Moura acknowledges the Miesian influence, speaking of his Burgo Tower, but refers people to something written by Italian journalist and critic, Francesco Dal Co, “it’s better not to be original, but good, rather than wanting to be very original and bad.”

At a series of forums called the Holcim Forum on sustainable architecture, Souto de Moura stated, “For me, architecture is a global issue. There is no ecological architecture, no intelligent architecture, no sustainable architecture—there is only good architecture. There are always problems we must not neglect; for example, energy, resources, costs, social aspects—one must always pay attention to all these.”

http://www.pritzkerprize.com/2011/biography