Architect and architectural educator, Álvaro Joaquim de Melo Siza Vieira was born in a small coastal town near Porto, Portugal on the 25th of June 1933. He is very respected for his work, both internationally (under the name: Alvaro Siza) as well as in his homeland (under the name Siza Vieira).

He completed the first projects of his career (four houses in his home city) in 1954, a year before graduating from the University of Porto’s Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade do Porto. Alongside Fernando Tavora—with whom he worked with from 1955-1958 and still collaborates on impressive projects, such as most recently, the Municipal Museum Abade Pedrosa in Porto—Siza is one of the great references of the Porto School of Architecture.

Siza has received immense recognition for his designs, including those for housing, public swimming pools, universities, and museums. In 2014, he donated much of his architectural archive to the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, Canada as well as to the Fundcao Gulbenkian in Lisbon and the Fundacao de Serralves in Porto, Portugal.

He has received numerous prestigious recognitions for this contribution to his art, including RIBA’s Royal Gold Medal in 2009 and the Golden Lion for Lifetime Acchievement at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale. And has received the title of Honoris Causa Doctor by the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, and the University of Palermo among many others around the world.