This book documents a unique experience of a journey by Álvaro Siza Vieira, Vincent Mentzel and Kenneth Frampton to the early work of Siza in Porto. This book includes a vast collection of descriptions, drawings and photographs by Vincent Mentzel about the project, as well as a writing by Siza Vieira himself and other texts. The book also includes an analysis of the bathers' course by Pedro Vieira de Almeida, as well as testimonies of the architects Diogo Seixas Lopes, Manuel Aires Mateus, Michel Toussaint, Joao Manoel Gomes Da Silva, Lui s Urbano, Diogo Seixas Lopes and Pedro Vieira de Almeida. A lvaro Siza was the 1992 winner of The Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Kenneth Frampton is Ware Professor of Architecture at Columbia GSAPP, where he has taught since 1972. He was trained as an architect at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London and has worked as an architect and as an architectural historian and critic. In addition to Columbia, Frampton has taught at a number of leading institutions including the Royal College of Art in London, the ETH in Zurich, the Berlage Institute in Amsterdam, EPFL in Lausanne and the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio. He is the author of Modern Architecture and the Critical Present (1980), Studies in Tectonic Culture (1995), American Masterworks (1995), Le Corbusier (2001), Labour, Work & Architecture (2005), and most recently, L'Altro Movimento Moderno (2015) and A Genealogy of Modern Architecture: Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form (2015). He is currently at work on an expanded fifth edition of Modern Architecture: A Critical History.