Mimesis Museum | Álvaro Siza

December issue 2010
Text by Marco Mulazzani / Casabella

“Finally, Alvaro Siza went to Korea, when the construction of the museum had almost been completed. The photographs by Fernando Guerra show him, as we would expect to see him, intent on drawing – or, if you prefer, on storing up other memories, certainly to be “forgotten” when the time comes to start a new project. Perhaps, had the Kublai Khan met him, he would have spoken to him with words similar to those addressed to Marco Polo: «It seems to me that you recognize cities better in the atlas than by visiting them in persona. We’d like to imagine an answer given by the Portuguese architect, not so different from the one supplied by the Venetian: ((Traveling, one notices that the differences tend to fade: every city starts to resemble all the others, places seem to swap form, order and distances, a formless dust invades the continents. Your atlas stores the differences, intact: that assortment of qualities that are like the letters of the names. The same qualities of the atlas of Kublai Khan, perhaps, can be seen in the “atlas” of Siza – from which, until each form has found its architecture, new works of architecture will continue to be born.”

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