Siza and Wright: two museums and the visitor

Abstract

The article presents a comparative study of two celebrated buildings – the Iberê Camargo Foundation (ICF), in Porto Alegre, designed by Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza, and the Guggenheim Museum, in New York, designed by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The motivation for this work lies in the opportunity the recent construction of the ICF museum in Porto Alegre came to offer – in view of the honors and distinctions it has received from local and international architectural critique – for a discussion on the theme of quality, or performance, in architecture. The comparison with the Guggenheim Museum comes from a broadly observed formal, functional and iconic similarity observed between the two buildings. The article has an eminently empirical nature. The methodology applied in the analyses has antecedents in the architectural promenade, in the Corbusean´s sense of the concept, and is concerned with the quality of the walk, taking into account the way these buildings are understood by the visitor – their legibility – and the way they accommodate the bodies in space – their functionality. The article eventually shows that, despite their conspicuous formal and iconic similarities, the spatial performance observed in the two buildings has been radically distinct, especially in respect of the way they deal with spatial integration and spatial segregation from the standpoint of the visitor.