Critique: building appraisals Álvaro Siza's <italic>Bonjour Tristesse:</italic> a symphony for a big city: Fid-Bau Portal

Critique: building appraisals Álvaro Siza's Bonjour Tristesse: a symphony for a big city

Mota, Nelson

The directors of the Internationale Bauausstellung Berlin (IBA-Berlin) famously created a Janus face for urban renewal through the 1980s, as an attempt to cope with Berlin's struggle for identity during the Cold War. IBA-Berlin's intellectual framework was divided between Kleihues's critical reconstruction of the past (IBA-Neubau), and Hämer's careful urban renewal (IBA-Altbau). While the IBA-Neubau generated famous buildings designed by architects such as Aldo Rossi, Oswald Mathias Ungers, John Hejduk and Peter Eisenmann, the production of the IBA-Altbau section was somewhat more discreet, yet with conspicuous buildings designed by Hinrich and Inken Baller, and by Álvaro Siza.

In this article I will focus on Álvaro Siza's Bonjour Tristesse, designed and built in the early 1980s under the auspices of the IBA-Altbau section. Situated in Berlin's Kreuzberg district, this building simultaneously incorporates and transgresses the urban renewal principles of both Kleihues and Hämer. It challenges existing conventions and typologies, and caters for the urban experience of the migrants arriving in the big city, activating the creative potential of the ‘as found’ as a strategy to enhance collective memory and promote political engagement through conflictive consensus. This article examines the design decision-making process of the Bonjour Tristesse, and the coeval reception of the project. It demonstrates the extent to which Siza's critical account of a confrontation with reality contributed to the development of a project in tune with the ambivalence of modernity, a building that is at the same time strange and familiar, detached and situated, sterile and contaminated.