The latest collaboration between Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza and Italian architectural photographer Duccio Malagamba is a hard-to-miss architecture book of pure aesthetic delight. Before / After: Álvaro Siza Duccio Malagamba is half the length of the authoritative Siza monograph Phaidon published in 2000 and limits itself to 20 projects from this architect’s 70 years of practice. However, its impact is much greater, supported by Malagamba’s expert imagery. The photographs are paired with Siza’s expressive concept sketches on every spread, which explains the subtitle of the book (Siza loosely stands for 'before', and Malagamba for 'after').
The production is handsome and of manageable size; the layout is spacious, giving each building room to breathe. It’s hard to convey the sensual experience of architecture in a book, especially when it’s as visually reductivist as Siza’s, but these pictures capture the qualities of light and space, subtleties of form and refinement of detail.
