The Roberto Ivens House - House of Architecture, in Matosinhos, where Siza Viera's family lived, has been classified as a Monument of Municipal Interest, according to an announcement published this Thursday in the Diário da República
"The Matosinhos City Council deliberated, in an ordinary meeting on 27 July this year, the approval of the final decision of the classification procedure of the Roberto Ivens House - House of Architecture, property located at rua Roberto Ivens, no. 582, in Matosinhos, União das Freguesias de Matosinhos e Leça da Palmeira, as a monument of municipal interest," reads the Official Gazette.
The house was commissioned by José Gonçalves de Lima Camacho (1831-1882), Álvaro Siza's great-grandfather, in the second half of the 19th century.
The local authority argued, when presenting the proposal, that "the Roberto Ivens House is part of the group of houses that also have value for those who lived there, for what lived there and that, for all these reasons, are intended to last".
And it was in order to recognise and value all these dimensions - the historical, architectural and patrimonial - that the City Council decided in 2007 to buy the house and in July decided to classify this building as a Monument of Municipal Interest.
The fact that the Siza Vieira family lived in this house, that the architect Álvaro Siza, the first Portuguese to receive the Pritzker Prize in 1992, spent his adolescence and youth in it, and that it is today the result of his interventions, particularly in the 1960s, contributed to the council's decision.
For the same reasons, after its acquisition in 2007, the council decided to ask the architects Álvaro Siza and Carlos Castanheira to design its rehabilitation, with a view to establishing the ACA - Associação Casa da Arquitetura (House of Architecture Association) and the Álvaro Siza Documentation Centre.
The house is a street building occupying almost the entire front of the "plot", with only narrow side passages that make the construction detach from the neighbouring buildings and actually have four façades. It occupies approximately 84 square metres of a plot that is about 420 square metres.
"It is very good in this time, so bad for architecture, for a city [Matosinhos] to have a purpose to recover and conserve the house", said Álvaro Siza Vieira, in February, in the ceremony of public presentation of the project and its integration in the universe of Casa da Arquitectura, assuming that in these last years of his professional time what he has done most is to recover works he did in the past, but that he is "tired".
The building, which received rehabilitation works under the responsibility of the Matosinhos City Hall and which were closely monitored by Álvaro Siza, welcomes researchers who come to work, study and research at the Casa da Arquitectura, namely the collections in the care of the Casa da Arquitectura, but also curators and architects who develop work around the institution.
The Pritzker Prize winner recalled that the family house is a work of his father - Júlio - and that it was his father who asked him to make a pavilion in the backyard of the house, when he was 14 years old, with tiles, with a laboratory for his brother, a chemical engineer.
"It was my first work literally, with my father's design," he declared, assuming that he never got to live in the house after it was transformed, because he got married and moved to Porto.
On the occasion, Siza added that he participated again with "enthusiasm" in the recuperation of the family house, considering that it was "good" that a city had an interest in architecture.
The restoration works were in charge of the Matosinhos City Hall.
Also at the presentation of the project, the mayor of the municipality, Luísa Salgueiro, mentioned that the handover of Siza Vieira's family house to the Casa da Arquitetura is a "moment of enormous importance for Matosinhos", since the building "is returned to the community with its original style".
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