Werner Blaser
Birkhäuser 2003, £20.00, 96pp
ISBN 3-7643-0087-6

A material with the richest of colour ranges, stone’s enduring qualities nevertheless seem to be best encapsulated in black and white photography. Surface, mass, texture and detail are all somehow more clearly delineated by this medium, and Werner Blaser’s book uses this fact to compelling advantage in his examination of Eduardo Souta de Moro’s fascination with granite. The book visually explores nine of the architect’s built projects – from the domestic scale of single family houses to the extraordinary new soccer stadium set into the bowl of a granite quarry at Braga for the 2004 European championships – as well as communicating something of Portugal’s rich tradition of stone construction. The text unfortunately aspires to a matching level of poetics but is thankfully limited, leaving the reader to concentrate on a thorough examination of the images.

Souta de Moro’s architecture is deceptively simple, but is based on a profound understanding of the importance of stone in Portuguese culture. His work seeks to combine his nation’s rich masonry tradition with the simplified and abstracted forms of contemporary architecture. This is a man who understands the significance of the construction joint, and each detail is refined and developed in response to modern sensibilities. The projects on display here have a sensitivity that only comes from an acceptance of the physical nature of the material. Deceptive it may be, but there is much to learn here: for anyone seriously interested in designing with stone, Souta de Moro’s granite architecture is ‘critical regionalism’ at its best.