Alvaro Siza (b.1933) is considered Portugal’s greatest living architect. His buildings are known for their austere beauty and their imaginative relationship to their surroundings. Relatively unknown outside his native Portugal when he won the 1992 Pritzker Prize, he has since built a number of masterful buildings around the world while retaining strong ties to his country. This volume highlights over 20 of these projects, approximately half of which are in Portugal. Each is explained in depth by author Carlos Castanheira as well as Siza himself, and illustrated with photographs, complete sets of drawings, and a wealth of Siza’s sketches.

Alvaro Siza, born in 1933, is considered one of Portugal’s greatest architects. He studied at the University of Porto School of Architecture from 1949 to 1955. After working with Fernando Távora, he opened a private practice in Porto in 1949. He has received honorary degrees from and taught in universities around the world, including Portugal, the United States, Switzerland, and South America. His work has been the subject of numerous books and exhibitions, and he has been honored with many awards, including the 1992 Pritzker Prize, the "European Award for Architecture" from the Economic European Community/Mies van der Rohe Foundation, and the Gold Medal of the Alvar Aalto Foundation.

Carlos Castanheira was born in Lisbon in 1957. In 1981, he graduated from the Course of Architecture in the School of Fine Arts in Porto. From 1981 to 1990, he lived in Amsterdam, where he worked as an architect and attended the course of Architecture of Academie voor Bouwkunst van Amsterdam. He has had a private practice since 1991, but had previously worked for Alvaro Siza for fourteen years, and they maintain a working relationship and strong friendship. Outside of his architecture practice, which primarily builds private houses, he is active in many different parts of the architectural community, including participating in conferences and juries for competitions, teaching and serving as an external examiner at schools of architecture, curating exhibitions, and editing and publishing books and catalogues.