Viana do Castelo Municipal Library

an architecture molded in the transition between nature and city

Abstract

This research analyses how Álvaro Siza responds to the commission for designing the Viana do Castelo
Municipal Library, in Portugal. It takes the work itself as an object of investigation and extracts from it some elements of analysis based on Michael Baxandall’s inferential method. It explains the equating of an architectural project conformed by a riverfront site,
located in a long transition strip between nature and city, and that until the improvements implemented by the federal initiative “Programa Polis” [Polis Program] was below its real urban and landscape potential.
In this context, it reflects on the way in which the architect articulates and conjugates the tensions coming from such different realities. It emphasizes
the importance given to the building-environment interaction from which an architecture of perpendicular and rectilinear contours is conceived, partially elevated from the ground, coherently and critically adapted to
circumstantial realities and dynamics. As a result, it highlights both the different possibilities of territorial appropriation generated by the arrival of a new equipment in the city and the architect’s desire to qualify the habitat as a reality that defines and models
social, geographical, cultural, and human structures that, together, contribute to the construction of
everyone’s life.