Knowing how to do and how to observe, Álvaro Siza and Francesco Dal Co.
Two intellectual forces facing each other and two distinct practices that mutually need to talk in order to understand each other better, overcome the threshold of the visible and compose a broad, immense picture concerning history.
Selecting, looking, noticing, connecting works distant in time, different in their strokes, perhaps even in intentions, and then considering the context, from which to escape however, in order not to be trapped in the attitude of an archivist who classifies and boxes, takes measures and seals.


Part one. Observation and analysis. The first part of the article opens with a description of the drawing chosen as a foothold to talk about the practice of drawing by Álvaro Siza, the vice of vice, as the himself has declared on several occasions. It is an architectural sketch for the project of the house of Mr. Manuel Fernando Rodrigues Neto (1955). A female figure, bent over, occupies almost the entire height of the sheet. Below her and behind her the axonometric sketch of the house and its elevation. Then at the top, on the right, a list of things to take into account during the construction phase (mosaicos, pia, portas, and more).

Dal Co does not prevaricate. The drawing in question is on the page preceding the article, a statement which we can no longer ignore. On the right of the following page a small reproduction of the engraving “The story of Ruth” (orig. “Poema de Ruth”) made by Siza in the same years of the project touches the extreme edge of the sheet. Our eye skips over the white figures silhouetted against a black background, bent towards the ground, then with a quick reverse turn our gaze returns to the “matronic” figure of the drawing on the previous page. Francesco Dal Co starts here to lead us, as a cultured historian of architecture as he is, into the indissolubility between Siza's architectural thought and his graphic work tout court.
We meet Filarete, to set him aside immediately. His allegory of architecture as creative mother of a work-building offered to the client exhausts every other possible explanation of the reasons for the figures by fluid and precise signs, or even clear and pressed, that populate Siza's architectural drawings, as well as the blank pages of his inevitable sketchbook.

Leon Battista Alberti gives us an extra foothold to answer the question. What do these figures represent that have nothing to do with architecture and that have populated his drawings for a lifetime?! Not only matrons and gleaners, but human figures and footprints, object elements and then knights and horses, jugglers and birds, and then etc. etc. etc. A passion? Siza would have liked to be a sculptor. Aspiration that he did not continue after the meetings with Carlos Ramos and Fernando Távora. But a biographic data is not enough to explain the meaning of a continuous practice that is intertwined with the activity of architect to the point of becoming peculiar. Returning to the drawing in question, Dal Co lingers on the stylistic discrepancy existing between the overloading of the rapid and insistent strokes that delineate the buildings and the open and continuous ones of the figures, the fulcrum of a stylistic passage that has its junction point in the errores inveni of which Alberti speaks to us and to which Dal Co gives a broader breath, identifying in Calvino almost an ante litteram interpreter of the practice of drawing. The escape from the architectural object namely is, historically, recognized as an essential moment in the practice of the project.

But how can the figure drawing be traced back to all this, if it is not possible to identify a unique correspondence between the images that occupy the same sheet, especially if executed in the same temporal fragment?

Part two. Apotheosis. Calvino's words excerpted from The pen in first person (orig. La penna in prima persona, 1977) at the opening of this second part serve Francesco Dal Co to outline an essential passage, the one that overturns the object into the subject. To act as a visual counterpoint to his arguments are reproduced, among others, two sketches for the Tidal Swimming Pool in Leça da Palmeira (1957) and a sketch for the headquarters of Banca Borges & Irmão in Vila do Conde (1978).
The author offers an acute reflection on the act of drawing as an action which, being devoid or not of the intentionality of its author, affirms itself as an act of freedom, precisely at the moment in which it detaches itself - apparently - from the programmatic initial intent, that of an architectural project in this case.

Act of creative and intellectual freedom, therefore, where there is no emulatio of already given aesthetic models, but an uninterrupted creation in the continuity of a sign that can vary in the stroke, as well illustrated by Dal Co, quoting Galileo in the metaphor of the ship which, travelling along an arch of a circle in its navigation, it does not stop oscillating at the minimum and continuous variations of the waves, and in the end it will cover an arch of circle anyway.
Francesco Dal Co uses precise literary references, and not directly linked to the world of architecture, to tell us that to understand the practice of drawing in Siza, a continuous and unstoppable practice, it must be placed in the transversal time of art criticism. Here we find Michelangelo quoted in Francisco de Holanda's Roman Dialogues, where he affirms the artist's full freedom in creating images that do not represent the world, but that belong to it, as the world creates itself in the uninterrupted flow of images it produces, in art, in clothing, in taste. This is the excerpt reported by Dal Co: «[...] Sometimes I think and imagine that among men there is only one art and science, and that this is drawing or painting, and that all the others are its derivations. Certainly, in fact, well considering everything that is done in life, you will realize that everyone, without knowing it, is painting this world, both in creating and producing new shapes and figures, as in wearing various clothes, and in building and occupying space with buildings and painted houses, as in cultivating fields, in making paintings and signs working the land, in navigating the seas with sails, in fighting and dividing legions, and finally in deaths and funerals, as well as in all the others operations, gestures and actions" (trans. by the author).
Here, paraphrasing Francesco Dal Co through Michelangelo. Sometimes I think and imagine.

 
Article: Dal Co, Francesco, “L’uomo-linea. Un furto a Italo Calvino”, Casabella, 896, 04, LXXXIII, Mondadori, Milano aprile 2019, p. 98-105.
Here the issue 896 of Casabella