Friendship, A Few Days with Alvaro Siza in the Thoronet Abbey

What does an architect look at when he discovers a place and what does he see that the visitor does not? During the summer of 2005, the Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza discovered the Thoronet Cistercian abbey, in the high Var, while he was invited to a sort of “carte blanche” which would take place the next summer.

His friend, the writer Dominique Machabert, is with him. He observes what Siza is looking at and asks him about the relationship between these old forms – those which held the architect’s attention – and his work rooted in modernity. Alvaro Siza then starts speaking and gives us his personal outlook of the site.

36 minutes, 2007, French Version, coproduced with the Maison de l’Architecture et de la Ville PACA.

Les Productions de Effa: Thinking architecture, cities, landscape and country. Observe man in his physical space. Cultivate  memory and transmission.