Between 2021 and 2023, a team coordinated by Paulo Tormenta Pinto and Ana Tostões developed the research project “The Critical Monumentality of Álvaro Siza – Urban Renewal Projects after the 1998 Lisbon International Exhibition”. The book “A Monumentalidade Crítica de Álvaro Siza” is the result of this work, constituting the fruit of scientific and pedagogical sharing carried out between researchers, teachers and architecture students. The role of archives was decisive in this process, guiding the research team in the support of primary sources associated with Álvaro Siza’s projects and thoughts, many of them expressed in loose notes in the margins of the drawings. The archive of the Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA), in Montréal, was a fundamental platform for the research, containing a significant part of Álvaro Siza’s collection, including documentation relating to the case studies covered in the investigation and notebooks of sketches that allow you to wander through the visions, convictions and hesitations associated with the various projects. At national level, the archive of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation was decisive, it is there that most of the documentation relating to the works in the south of Portugal is deposited, namely the materials relating to the Portuguese Pavilion that served as the basis for the research. Álvaro Siza’s personal archive, which is located in the Rua do Aleixo office, in Porto, was of great importance, and relevant materials and documents were made available.

The Portuguese Pavilion, designed for Expo’98, is the starting point of this research, presenting itself in its singularity as a central moment in a process of urban renewal, with repercussions on the political consciousness of the end of the 20th century. In Portugal, the echoes of this policy continued after the Lisbon exhibition, consolidating an urban idea that had been theorized since the end of the 1980s. The reading of territories over a long period of time and immersion in architectural culture are invariable assumptions in Siza’s approach and discursive foundations about “monumentality”.