Alvaro Siza: Complete Works. (Selling Siza?).

By Kenneth Frampton. London: Phaidon. 2000. [pounds sterling]60

I'm not sure I want to find every Alvaro Siza project in the same tome. The master is fecund. He is also sufficiently humble to attend to many comparatively minor proposals so that this enormous book (620 pages) even includes his grandmother's kitchen. At home in northern Portugal, Siza worked at the essentials of architecture for at least two decades before he was discovered by the global architecture scene. In this he has something in common with Frank Gehry. Augmenting the physical and cultural contextuality of his work -- his manipulation of topography and often Mediterranean massing -- is a constant, intuitive testing of spatial models gleaned from Wright, Aalto, Mendelsohn, Le Corbusier, and Loos. Perhaps also the Postmodern quartet of Venturi, Rossi, Hejduk and Gehry himself.

Such issues are elegantly tracked in Frampton's mega-essay, an exegesis that focuses in on such key buildings as the Carlos Ramos Pavilion at Oporto's Faculty of Architecture, and the Galician Centre for Contemporary Art in Santiago. There are 10 short essays from Siza: one includes the felicitous affirmation that 'Learning ... is still based ... on drawing ... and on history.'

Unfortunately, very many of Siza's own drawings are here reproduced too small or too faint to be decipherable. To comprehend the achievement of this masterly architecture, one needs more contextual information and more sense of how these interiors and precincts unfurl before the pedestrian.