21. November 2023
Photo: Screenshot from “ALA ÁLVARO SIZA”
The new wing of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal, will open to the public in early 2024. The museum first opened to the public in 1999 in a building designed by Álvaro Siza, who also added the new wing — appropriately called the Álvaro Siza Wing.
Siza's original building for the Serralves Foundation respected the trees, gardens and existing villa in Serralves Park, which dates back to the 1930s. Sited at a remove from the villa, the 1999 museum has 14 galleries spread across three floors, arranged north-south with two wings defining a courtyard. Between the museum's inauguration and the imminent opening of the Álvaro Siza Wing — described “like a new branch growing from a tree” on the museum's website — Siza added the Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira (2019), restored the villa (2021), and added a house (2021) for the gardeners maintaining the park.
This information we grasp from the short film below, which, while in Portuguese, effectively uses photographs, text, and animated architectural models to clearly give a brief history of the museum's architectural projects and describe the design of its new wing. The three-story Álvaro Siza Wing will have two floors devoted to exhibitions and one story for the foundation's archives. It will open early next year with two major exhibitions: one dedicated to the Serralves Collection and the other dedicated to the work of Álvaro Siza.