A VISIT TO A MUSEUM WHERE TIME DOES NOT EXIST by Mark Rego

A meditation on time in architecture by philosopher and architect Mark Rego. In this piece Rego examines the apparently paradoxical union in an art museum of a painter who rejected time, and an architect ‘whose works are perhaps some of the most embodied in temporality.’ Alvaro Siza’s Museu de Arte Contemporanea in Chaves, Portugal to house the works of Nadir Afonso.

“They form sentences with no meaning, flowing softly like water I can feel, a forgetful stream whose ripples mingle and undefine, becoming other, still other ripples, and still again other. Thus ideas and images, throbbing with expressiveness, pass through me in resounding processions of pale silks on which imagination shimmers like moonlight, dappled and indefinite.”

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, 259

The following essay concerns a visit to a small museum in the far north of Portugal, in the city of Chaves – The Nadir Afonso Contemporary Art Museum, designed by the renowned architect Álvaro Siza Vieira. I have been aware of this museum for some years, since its inauguration in 2016. I have studied its plans and photographs and read the critiques by published specialists. Furthermore, the work of  Álvaro Siza has always been an inspirational presence since I started studying architecture. His works are spread worldwide, receiving praise from the highest specialists and critics of the field. Among the many distinctions, the first-ever Mies van der Rohe Award in 1988 and the Pritzker Prize in 1992 are perhaps the most notable. It is not an unfair characterisation that Siza is perhaps the last living modernist of our times.

The museum in question was built to exhibit the work of the painter Nadir Afonso, a trained architect from the school of Porto who later studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. As an architect, he collaborated with Le Corbusier and, later, in Brasil, with Oscar Niemeyer. However, his true passion was painting, which became characterised by a geometric abstractionist attitude. He is also the author of several books on aesthetic theory, in which he developed a unique view that art is entirely objective and ruled by natural laws, namely, mathematics and geometry. For him, art is not a product of the imagination but instead of observation, perception and the manipulation of form. Among his published works is the manifesto Time Does Not Exist. Nadir passed away in 2013; however, the museum captures the perfect union of the painter who rejected the existence of time with an architect whose works are perhaps some of the most embodied in temporality.  

On the subject of time, it is best to make a few distinctions before moving forward. Nadir’s rejection of time may not be absolute. In his manifesto, he says,

“In truth, time does not have an entity as such. As it is the alleged relation between the movement of concrete bodies and the concrete space travelled by them, only those factors – space and movement – exist, time being their transcendent relation. […] Contrary to the illusion-time, duration does not need a corresponding space or movement…”[i]

Nadir clearly distinguishes between measured time and duration. There is a close familiarity with the theories of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who made a similar claim at the end of the 19^th century. For Bergson, the notion of measured time is an abstraction created by the intellect to allow our rational faculties an understanding of duration, which, on the other hand, was entirely subjective, experiential and intuitive. The familiarity with Bergson’s philosophy does not stop here. For Bergson, reality is uninterrupted change, and our understanding of it is constructed by the intellect and intuition, which are distinct things in constant opposition, although either could never exist in isolation. For Nadir Afonso, at the foundation of all art is a perception of mathematics. According to him, the laws of mathematics and geometry are constant, but sensitive perception is emotive, contingent and evolutionary. When we look at art, we perceive its forms and simultaneously experience the phenomena of the subjective work; there is a double process in action. On the one hand, the underlying schemata of the forms are governed by the constant laws of mathematics and geometry – the laws of the intellect – on the other hand, our perception of these forms provokes an emotional response which only intuition can respond to. He says,

“The laws of the forms cannot be seen at the level of intelligence and of reasoning but are felt at the level of intuitive perception, so when the true artist seeks perfection, he does in fact apply himself intuitively to that mathematics and universal exactness.”[ii]

The world is thus understood and perceived through this double vision – intellect and intuition – constantly exchanging themselves according to our attitude. If we desire to immobilise things to dissect and analyse, then the intellect takes the helm; if we desire to see reality for what it is, as everchanging and unfolding, we must widen our perception to more than the data received. Thus, even mathematics is subject to the double vision of the intellect and intuition; this is particularly evident with geometry – we either see what geometry represents as a static image and something abstracted from reality, or we see it as a register of a moving reality, where all points, lines and surfaces are in a constant contingency. Nadir Afonso says,

“If an individual is an artist, he doesn’t search for one thing or the other, he doesn’t search for figuration, he doesn’t search for the object’s perfection, he doesn’t search for originality. He doesn’t search for the invocation of things. If he is truly an artist, there is one function, one quality in nature that attracts him. This motivation of nature that attracts him is called mathematics. However, here we have the theatrics; while mathematics in other human disciplines is rationalised, in art, mathematics is purely intuitive. Do you see the drama? It is mathematics that is essential to the work of art. It is a fundamental characteristic of the work of art. They [the artists] do not recognise this; they don’t recognise this faculty, this intuitive faculty. They say: No, it’s nothing like this; I understand nothing of mathematics, of geometry. They understand nothing of geometry at the level of intelligence, but they employ it intuitively. This mechanism is what is strange. “[iii]

If this dual understanding of mathematics is true of all art, it is particularly evident in architecture, for we cannot escape geometry at its foundation. What has changed with the advent of computer-assisted drawing and digital information models is how much of this geometry we still control and how much is surrendered to digitalisation’s rational, analytical processes. In this sense, if we embrace a more intuitive approach to architecture, we could characterise architects as ‘intuitive geometers’. Siza also evokes a kind of double vision when distinguishing between the notions of looking and seeing. To look, according to Siza, is disinterested; it only reveals an impression or general representation; it is fundamentally intellectual. To see is to search, to understand and enter the thing-in-itself, and only intuition can achieve this. Siza says,

“The more we see, the more we invent. Because what we see is not just an observable reality, able to be analysed, it is also an impulse that triggers ideas from a fragment.”[iv]

Rafael Moneo characterises Siza as an architect who works within the contingency “without forgetting the importance of finding the origin of the architecture.”[v] In this sense, architecture becomes something akin to poetry, capable of merging a series of meanings and happenings – a flowing reality – into a single event. It is an architecture of the moment, in which, according to Moneo, “time is trapped by an architecture that makes itself felt sensorially.”[vi] There is a presence and a constant fleeting motion of a ground constantly shifting, (re)emerging and (re)creating. Siza’s architecture, like his sketches, seems to be in a constant state of drawing. A continuous line fills the white surface as if it is searching for something – a potential. The line is only the semblance, the perception of the surface where form and matter meet and interpenetrate. There is a sense of incompleteness, not as unfinished, but in a more cinematographic sense, a melancholic longing for a resolution. Such a resolution is contingent and unknown; it implies a series of multiplicities, some complementary, some in conflict. The role of architecture is to resolve these ambivalent multiplicities; however, it can only resolve them when contemplated. Moneo says,

“In Siza, we relish the potential condition of works, which demand to be finished by those who contemplate them. […] If we are ready to understand that Siza’s work cannot be seen as something abstracted from the person who contemplates it, we will understand the fluidity of an architecture that recalls the attitudes of thinkers like Heraclitus or Bergson.”[vii]

On this note, let me begin with the (re)visit to the Nadir Afonso Museum of Contemporary Art. If invoking Heraclitus, we must be sure that this (re)visiting is no longer that of the original experience, for neither the museum nor I have resisted the constant forces of change.

My journey began in Lisbon, a four-hour drive to the city of Chaves. Although I grew up in Portugal, I rarely experienced the stark differences within the country as I did on this journey. When making such a journey, one realises it is impossible to characterise a single understanding of Portuguese architecture. I assume the same applies to the architecture of any other country. Architecture becomes a product of a series of circumstances in constant change, some geographical, others geological.

Chaves is one of the northernmost cities in Portugal, only 10 km from the border with Galicia. Its history dates back to the Palaeolithic period. The Celts settled in the region, and later, the Roman Empire and its legions arrived in the third century BC. Its privileged geographical location made it an important point on the Via Augusto (Via XVII) connecting Bracara Augusto (Braga) to Asturica (Astorga). The two-thousand-year-old Roman bridge, or Trajan’s Bridge, as it dates from the time of this emperor, is still a vital axis within the city fabric. The river and the ruins of the Roman thermal baths reinforce the essential relationship between the city and water. The city’s original name, Aquae Flaviae, combines this vital element with the title of the ruling family – Flavia. To this day, the local inhabitants are still referred to as flavienses. In the fifth century, the city was invaded by the barbarians and in the eighth century, by the Arabs. After the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula, the city was incorporated into the Portuguese territories in 1160. Later in the seventeenth century, the city became an important military outpost during the Restoration Wars between Portugal and Spain. Several forts were built during this period – S. Francisco, S. Neutel and Madalena – along with barracks, a hospital and a convent. During the Napolean Wars, Chaves was sieged and captured by the French army, only to be liberated ten days later by Portuguese forces in March 1809. Its military history and the defeat of pro-Royalist forces fighting against the Portuguese First Republic in 1912 gave the city the deserved title of the Heroic City of Chaves. During the twentieth century, Chaves became an important economic and urban centre, growing into the second-largest city in the district of Vila Real.[viii]

This brief summary of the city’s history is critical because history is more than a series of facts ordered chronologically; it reveals the continuous unfolding, evolution and change of the things it deals with. Or, to appeal to Bergson, it reveals a certain duration of human existence particular to this specific locus. Therefore, the Nadir Afonso Contemporary Art Museum does not happen in isolation; it emerges from the history/duration of its place, becoming an integral element of its becoming. Architecture, such as this case, is able to fold onto itself a series of images or surfaces unravelling through time into an existential form where matter can be penetrated and experienced. Unfortunately, in many contemporary projects, we have gradually replaced the richness of architectural culture with an architecture of anomalies juxtaposed in succession but never differentiated – an architecture of diagrams and icons that is highly intellectualised. But such is not the case with the architecture of Álvaro Siza, particularly this museum in Chaves. Here, we find architecture that emerges from the context, history and culture of its place. These factors are not always explicitly expressed in Siza’s work but are always implicit in its originating line. Siza says about his process,

“Each of my designs seeks to capture, with the utmost rigour, a single concrete moment of a fleeting image, in all its nuances to the extent to which one manages to capture that fleeting quality of reality. The design will emerge more or less clearly, and the more precise it is, the more vulnerable it will be.”[ix]

What is true for the history and the durations present in the local context is also true for the personalities that emerge and become embodied in the work – in this particular case, of both the architect and the artist. According to Bergson, a work of art is an expression of the whole personality of the artist. In the case of architecture, this expression, to different degrees, is a multiplicity of personalities, including, and not less importantly, those who contemplate and live in its spaces. It is as if matter itself is more than just an organisation of particles; memory-images permeate everything. Depending on which vision one adopts – the intellect or intuition – the reading of architecture is more or less rational or intuitive. Great architecture can be both simultaneously; in this sense, at the very foundation of architecture, it becomes Nadir Afonso’s mathematics. We may not entirely grasp the rules of mathematics, but, as he says, “we feel its exactness.”[x] A feeling akin to what Bergson called intuition.

I had walked towards the museum from the fort of S. Francisco, at the top of one of Chaves’s many hills. I knew the general direction, but I was unfamiliar with the place. As I turned the corner of the street, the sidewalk steps away. I felt a change of material through my feet; looking down, I noticed I was no longer walking on the cobblestone but on large square granite pavers. I was still more than one hundred meters from the building, and the street was certainly not included within the property lines; however, the building had come to meet me halfway. I began to notice that the square pavers were all whole, with no off-cuts; instead, there was an evident geometric precision or care; it was as if these pavers were the unit of measurement of the whole building. The sidewalk was a first invitation. The path turns, and I find myself walking up the ramp now; the pavers continuing to guide me have now turned up to form the parapet wall – a technical solution and a gentle embrace guiding me towards the entrance. The width of the ramp varies, compressing and releasing, turning your view towards the landscape or surrounding buildings and then back to the museum. At the top, there is a slight compression of the ramp walls, followed by a wider terrace, then a stronger compression directing you towards the entrance door. I recall that Siza had employed the same design strategy at the Tea House in Matosinhos in 1963. It is as if the architect comes to meet you and guide the visitors to the entrance of the building.

As I ascended the ramp, I contemplated the exterior. The building is composed of a series of volumes: a large horizontal volume that extends into the landscape and a series of smaller volumes in the southwest where the entrance is located. These smaller volumes are articulated and intersect at different angles, appearing disjoined from the main volume’s solidity. However, once I stepped inside, its organisation became evident. As I passed through the threshold of the main entrance, space expanded once again. Each smaller volume was a programmatic element – reception, library, shop, auditorium, toilets –  and their intersection created a central reception lobby, as a plaza within a medieval city. From the inside, the individual volumes are no longer perceptible; they appear as a single merged space. There was a strange moment when the exterior image of the articulated volumes did not match the interior’s experience; it was as if I had been transported to another dimension – an interior world. As I approached the galleries, the interior space compressed and released as an intricate dance. The temporary exhibit gallery articulates the final shift in the angle of the building; once passed, the spatial organisation takes on a different character; the main gallery is a long rectangular volume illuminated through a large skylight.

The museum archive is to the north of the main gallery, and to the east is another gallery along a corridor. In this gallery/corridor, a long horizontal window rips through the external wall (re)establishing a connection to the landscape and the park adjacent to the museum. Inaccessible to the public are the administration spaces, and at the very northern end, another volume detaches itself from the main body, an artist studio named after Nadir Afonso. I wander about the museum, moving between galleries, touching the walls and trying to imagine the line that drew them, gradually making my way back to the entrance. As I leave the building, I am hit with warmth and the stark sunlight and immediately transported back to the external world.

I continue to wander around the building. The museum is elevated from the ground plane and rests on a series of walls angled between each other as if they were blades, each rising from the ground to hold the building. One of the reasons for the elevated structure is that the land often floods when the margins of the river that runs parallel to the building overflow. These blades are perforated by geometric figures, allowing them to be passed through, returning the land to be inhabited through a novel experience. At first, I understood these walls as an abstract conceptualisation of time, sliced into a series of intervals we could penetrate. However, like in many of Siza’s works, there is never one interpretation. There is also something of the past memory of the territory’s organisation, like agricultural walls that divided the land into a series of plots.[xi] The site was known as the Canelha das Longras, where a poor settlement once existed on the city’s limits.[xii] Are these concrete walls a (re)actualisation of a previous place? I began to understand the articulated volumes; they respond to the angles of these stone walls, to a memory the architect refused to erase. Siza was adamant about maintaining the stone walls and ruins as an integral part of the project. On the existing ruins, he says,

“because here we have a first plan with history, with architectonics markings, with a relation to the river very interesting and lived, […] I want to preserve this.”[xiii]

However, there is also something of the buildings adjacent to the site. The neighbouring buildings develop a multi-layered pattern of small gardens and extensions growing almost organically as a quilt. There is also something about Nadir Afonso’s paintings, particularly his more geometric periods. Walking through the underbelly of the building, I had the sensation of walking into one of Nadir Afonso’s paintings, which had somehow assumed a three-dimensional form. When questioned about the intention of referencing the painter’s work, Siza responds, “I always say, consciously no […] but it is a fact that in certain periods of Nadir’s paintings, triangles and circles appear.”[xiv]

The presence of the human body is also implicit in the volumetric articulations of the building. Manual Graça Dias mentions how the artist’s studio is the feet and the library the head.[xv] Eduardo Souto de Moura makes the analogy with Le Conbusier’s hand in Chandigarh.[xvi] Walking around the building, noticing the changing light and shadows, I often became confused if it was I who was walking around the building or if this sleeping giant had moved. Regarding Le Corbusier, Souto de Moura also points out Siza’s adherence to the modern movement and the five points of architecture, i.e., the promenade of the ramp, pilotis, free plan, free façade and the horizontal window.[xvii] Siza develops a multiplicity of relationships and meanings, some consciously, others presumably unconsciously.

The architect Nuno Grande raises the notion of alterity in Siza’s architecture: a capacity to be other or different, a certain otherness that is also implicit in Portuguese culture – e.g., in the poet Fernando Pessoa. Siza’s ability to interpret the place in all its manifestations, as well as the capacity to invoke other images distant in time and space, make him, according to Nuno Grande, a universalist architect.[xviii] This universalism derives from a particular way of seeing the world and reality. A reality that is continuously unfolding in a processual manner; ultimately, it is the ability to see reality through the multiplicity of durations that constitute it. In Bergsonian terms, a widened perception which allows the architect access to a multiplicity of memories; some are already there and become revealed, and others are transported and embodied into the place. The context is the initial driver, but other places, other influences, other experiences, and other architectures become overlaid, a kind of extended regionalism that preserves the uniqueness of what is there while simultaneously being open to criticism and receiving other impulses from afar.

We find this implicit critique in Siza’s architecture, continuously searching and (re)establishing present and foreign relationships, evolving into novel conditions that emerge from this multiplicity of sources and impulses. Open to the past, present and future, and above all to the contemplation and interpretation of others, adding additional layers of meaning and additional durations to the milieu. A total environment that is alive and evolving is formed by a complexity of geometries and a plurality of relationships. As stated in the publication Monumentalidade Crítica (Critical Monumentality),

“Siza evidences the potential of the museum exceeding its functions as a container becoming part of the city, proposing an architecture that goes beyond the built object but is created in dialogue with the local context and its pre-existing structures, with the artist’s work and with universal references, capable of producing a new interpretation of place.”[xix]

In such an architecture, tradition and innovation are more complementary than contradictory forces. It is also an architecture that disrupts the current dogmas of architectural education and practice – i.e., the fetishisation of space and abstract concepts or the professionalisation of a discipline, reducing it to a service. In Siza’s words, “There are people that say architecture is not an art. I think that is a kind of excuse to accept things that have less quality.”[xx] The main difficulty is teaching and learning this intuitive architecture, an architecture made of time, where space is a translation of time and not the reverse. Regarding his process and the educational value of it, Siza says,

“They tell me (some friends) that I do not have a supporting theory or method. That nothing I do points the way. That it is not educational. A sort of boat at the mercy of the waves… I do not expose the boards of our boat too much, at least on the high seas. They have been split many times. I study the currents, eddies… I can be seen alone, walking the deck. But all the crew and all the equipment are there… I dare not put my hand on the helm, when I can only just see the polar star. And I do not point out a clear way. The ways are not clear.”[xxi]

In relating Siza’s work with the philosophy of Henri Bergson, it is perhaps here, in the definition of a theoretical or educational value, that such a philosophy can be most relevant to architecture. Not because it provides a synthesis or rational pathway but because it reveals the world for what it is and exposes the deficits in our intellectual understanding of reality. Thinking of an architecture that can inhabit the world in its continuous and persistent unfolding, Bergson suggests an alternative model to the fixity of concepts, space, functions, and all that is rational and analytic. It does not propose the abandonment of geometric precision, mathematics or even the intellect, but instead, it proposes, as Nadir suggests, a distinct understanding of these forces that emerges from an intuitive perception of the world. Time becomes a pulsating, contracting, expanding, condensing milieu of consciousness manifesting and expressing itself in matter. Bergson presents a model of reality that is entirely indeterministic, emancipative and contingent, where matter is no longer passive but furnished with agency.

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[i] Nadir Afonso (2010), Time Does Not Exist: Manifesto, 23

[ii] Ibid, 59

[iii] Nadir Afonso in Nadir, Film by Bernardo Pinto de Almeida

[iv] Siza (2024), Grande Entrevista: Álvaro Siza, Ep. 31, season 17, min 17:10. Translation by author (check video format)

[v] Moneo (2004), Theoretical Anxiety and Design Strategies in the Work of Eight Contemporary Architects, 200

[vi] Ibid, 202-203

[vii] Moneo (2004), 204

[viii] URL:<https://livingchaves.pt/history/>, accessed November 1st 2024. (check format)

[ix] Siza (2000), On My Work in Álvaro Siza: Complete Works, 71

[x] Nadir Afonso in O Tempo não existe (doc.), min 16:00. Translated by author. (check reference format)

[xi] Pinto and Tostões eds. (2023), A Monumentalidade Crítica de Álvaro Siza, 221

[xii] Ibid, 219

[xiii] Siza in Pinto and Tostões eds. (2023), 221

[xiv] Siza in Pinto and Tostões eds. (2023), 224

[xv] Graça Dias in Pinto and Tostões eds. (2023), 223

[xvi] Eduardo Souto de Moura, Conference – Museu Nadir Afonso: Dois Icones que o Caracterizam URL: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJBc7Eydu0E&t=5453s>, min. 35:00, accessed 10 November 2024

[xvii] Ibid

[xviii] Nuno Grande, Conference – Museu Nadir Afonso: Dois Icones que o Caracterizam URL: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJBc7Eydu0E&t=5453s>, min. 1:00:00, accessed 10 November 2024. See also Pinto and Tostões eds. (2023), 224

[xix] Monteiro, Marques, Ovelheira, and Fonte in Pinto and Tostões eds. (2023), 226, translation by author

[xx] Siza in Álvaro Siza: Hiden Architecture, URL:<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axL1jBXih1s>, Accessed 13 November 2024

[xxi] Siza in Moneo (2004), 206