A Toronto exhibition pairs original sketches by Pritzker-prize winner Álvaro Siza and 14th century artifacts from the historic Alhambra.

The opening room features a large-scale model of the area, showing the importance of the overall cultural landscape to the palace complex.
The opening room features a large-scale model of the area, showing the importance of the overall cultural landscape to the palace complex.

Álvaro Siza: Gateway to the Alhambra centres on Siza’s competition-winning design for the Alhambra visitors’ centre, scheduled for completion in 2020. The design was completed with local architect Juan Domingo Santos, whose grandfather was one of the architects involved in earlier restoration work for the palatial complex.

The exhibition was originally conceived for the Aedes Architecture Forum in Berlin, and is curated by Portuguese architect António Choupina, who was taught by Siza. Originally conceived for an architectural audience, the curation is meant to be evocative, more than pedagogical: descriptive texts are limited, and labeled plans and renderings are deliberately placed only at the very end of the exhibition.

Site Model with Landscape Integration.” Álvaro Siza, 2011.
Site Model with Landscape Integration.” Álvaro Siza, 2011. - From the curator: Álvaro Siza enjoys paraphrasing Michelangelo by saying that the model is the most well spent money of any project. Having collaborated with the architect for years, expert model-maker Alvaro Negrello seems to agree, as he delivered perhaps the most important architectural mock-up of the exhibition. It makes a very clear case for the project’s intentions, with no room for misconceptions, presenting a discrete platform anchored by the topography outside of the monument’s wall. Gardens reclaim the existing parking lot, offering a new square to the city where vegetation and water lines soften Granada’s dry climate. Complex height systematizations reconnect the new museums with the street and allow for 8,500 daily visitors to comfortably cross the site, like one would in a miniature prototype of the full-scale Alhambra. © Patronato of the Alhambra and Generalife