I Have a Weakness for a Touch of Red

Essays on Architecture and Portugal

by Yehuda Safran

I Have a Weakness for a Touch of Red is a selection of essays on the art and architecture of Portugal by Yehuda Safran, who has been a professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University and Pratt Institute, as well as the director of Potlach journal.

Safran, who has previously written books on Adolf Loos, Mies van der Rohe, Anthony Gormley and Anish Kapoor, is not himself Portuguese; he writes here from the perspective of a traveler, enamored with the work of major architects Alvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura and artist Pedro Cabrita Reis, among others.

In an interview with the Portuguese website Virose, Safran said of Siza: “there is always a Portuguese accent to it, but he is really addressing universal architectural issues. The great poet writes normally in his own language.”

Paperback | 276 pages | Lars Müller Publishers | 2019