fala

fala did not begin with a manifesto. It began without clients, without capital, and with the kind of confidence available only to people who do not yet understand what they are doing. Reality was present, of course, but mostly as background noise. The irrelevant commissions we found were not even enough to pay the rent, while Palladio and ideas of future monographs occupied the conversations. The distance between those two worlds seemed irrelevant. Looking back, the beginning feels less like the foundation of a practice than an extended misunderstanding. We confused possibility with certainty. We confused visibility with relevance. We confused architecture with the images of architecture. The confusion was productive.

Before we had any meaningful evidence of competence, we accumulated evidence of promise. Before we had enough experience to justify a lecture, schools invited us to talk. Before we had enough built work to fill an article, editors invited us to publish. At some point, we even planned the non-speech with which we would refuse the Pritzker, should it ever arrive. This raises a slightly uncomfortable question: how much built work does an architecture practice actually need in order to exist? Our tangible production was scarce, but drawings, projects and obsessions were already abundant. We still wonder whether a practice is measured by the number of buildings it completes or by the intensity with which it constructs its own discourse. Long before we had set enough bricks and mortar, we had cast a position. The buildings arrived later, almost as evidence of something that was already underway.

We followed invitation, travelled often: London, Chicago, Berlin, Rome, Paris, Tokyo. We met architects who had previously existed only on the pages of books. We exhibited beside people whose work we admired. We collected phone numbers and email addresses as if they were credentials. We found ourselves inside a conversation to which we had contributed very little, while already being asked to comment on it. The situation was absurd, which is perhaps why it felt so natural. Jeffrey Kipnis once suggested that absurdity is a necessary characteristic of a behaviour of architects. We embraced that condition unknowingly, not because we were arrogant or rebellious, but because we genuinely lacked the perspective required to understand how improbable our circumstances were. For a while, we thought it was merit. Then we realised it was timing. Later, we understood it was both. Post-crisis Portugal had become visible again to small-scale foreign capital. Social media was becoming fully industrialised. Images travelled faster than buildings. Architectural culture was searching for new protagonists. We happened to be available. We happened to produce material that felt like architecture before architecture itself arrived.

Initially, the collages helped. Of course they did, and dismissing them would be unfair. Those digital images belonged to a very specific historical and technological moment. They also inherited some problematics raised by a previous generation, and translated them into something lighter, faster and simpler. They were easy to digest, but carried references that were larger than the projects themselves. David Hockney figures replaced gravity. Domestic narratives replaced technical explanations. Colour, too, was a discovery, and felt surprisingly disruptive. Suddenly every element could be pink, blue or green. Possibility replaced reality. Kersten Geers compared it all to the Pictures Generation. Whether architecture influenced the images, or the images influenced architecture remains unclear. The chicken and the egg, but with two speeds more and more difficult to reconcile: building sites becoming eternal, images becoming instantaneous. The distance between construction and publication collapsed. We somehow found comfort in this impossible tension, and we weren’t alone.

A strange thing about participating in a fiction long enough is that eventually it may become real. The lectures became teaching positions. The invitations became responsibilities. The promises became buildings. The projections became reality. Somewhere along the way, we accidentally became architects. This was inconvenient. Being an architect turned out to be significantly more complicated than acting like one. The profession introduced concepts previously absent from our worldview: responsibility, coordination, budgets, legislation, clients’ emails, delays, engineering consultants, waterproofing, taxation, construction claims, municipal interpretations, structural calculations, thermal bridges and thousands of other forms of organised disappointment.

Reality arrived. It normally does. Today, a little more than a decade later, we understand architecture very differently. We realised that our educated relationship with construction became, and remains, strangely abstract. We respect technique, but rarely fetishize it. Tectonic virtuosity has never been an ambition, and we seldom approach construction as a stage for disciplinary performance. This may explain why our details are often on the crude side. Others are better at the refined stuff. So, we prefer investing energy in the consequences of construction rather than in its celebration or in the display of the labor required to achieve it. Use value, effects, and affects tends to win over bravura.

We are no longer young enough to be properly naïve. Not yet old enough to be wise. Perhaps we are finally enough. We know what we are doing, most of the time. We know how buildings are assembled. We know how projects survive. We know how to compose a facade. We know why a column should not touch the ceiling. We know which battles matter and which ones merely flatter our ego. We know that many architectural discussions are irrelevant outside a small bubble of architecture geeks. We know that clients rarely care about our references. We know that contractors rarely care about our theories. We know that municipalities rarely care about either. We know that making naïve buildings despite all that is more valuable than being naïve.

Still, references and theories are what we think through. It is when architects make sense of precedents and theorize beyond objective hurdles that their voice matters, that they can have meaningful impact, both through their buildings and through their mediated reception. Sometimes a municipality imposes the blandest of façades. Sometimes a client desires more rooms than the volume allows. Sometimes such hurdles lead to disasters. Sometimes their accumulation leads to rational surprises. In 094 they led to what certainly, the only house in its vicinity in which every single space is cross-lit and cross-ventilated. In 102 we discovered that the most efficient shared staircase could also be the most sculptural. In 125 we were brought to bend the definition of a sloped roof to its breaking point. In 156 the hurdles led us to the flashiest of invisible buildings. In such cases the civic value of a building cannot be reduced to what matters to clients and municipalities. Nor can it be reduced to the daily lives of people in contact with the construction. Each of those uncanny organisms is specific, but altogether they shape possible models, either for nearby or for far away.

Tackling projects of this kind by the dozen requires pragmatism, and sometimes a sort of progressive cynicism. In a sense we have seen a lot—enough: clients, competitions, lectures, publications, successes, failures, construction sites, leaking skylights, heroic narratives. Enough architecture, despite an ever-present hunger for architecture. Enough to see that the architectural star system has nurtured a culture, but that its collapse is still a good thing. That attempts to revive it along the Baltic or elsewhere hold something tragic. Maybe because we are not part of that, we’re not keen to disguise the actual stakes of our projects. We are a small local practice, and we like it as such. We remain sustainable, even if deliberately not talking about ecology or technology, but often about economy. Our lectures seldom turn into rallies, or cry fests. We prefer to focus on healthily vivid small environments, and to talk about what populates our daily work: doors, columns, windows and RAL codes. We argue. We build. We publish. We write. We curate. We teach. We do all that from a somewhat disenchanted perspective about practice, but one that also seeks new enchantments within projects.

All these overlapping endeavours are possible because we are a team, and a great one. It’s always been the case. We are grateful to all its members not signing this text: to Tita; to João Carlos; to Catarina, Joana and Paulo, whom we still miss; to every intern whose questions forced us to explain the server structure, and ourselves, for the hundredth time; to what each one took away and what each one left behind. Together, they helped shape our collective form. Once again, the practice itself is the most challenging project. Decent working conditions, zero overtime work, a healthy collective experience between singular beings, rather than idealized flatness. In parallel, fala has been oriented by the four people signing this text: Filipe, Ana Luísa, Ahmed and Lera. We share a common curiosity and a broad agreement on what we want to explore, while occasionally maintaining different readings of the work itself. Responsibilities were always distributed unevenly, interests mostly overlapped, and complete agreement was never a necessity. Yet the atelier somehow maintained a coherent identity. Friction, confusion and the occasional existential crisis were inevitable. In a sense they also produced the work. The atelier’s identity has always been in flux. It resides in the fragile equilibrium of several competing positions.

One misconception deserves correction. Visibility should not be confused with stability. For much of our existence, we have depended on teaching contracts to balance the unbelievably low fees paid for our projects. The economy of architecture remains remarkably strained. Recognition arrived faster than financial security. By remaining a small structure, we continuously negotiate between the immaterial visibility of international recognition and the tangible instability of everyday practice. Paradoxically, perhaps that is precisely the point. Perhaps that is why it remains interesting. Our starving artist phase continues. Architecture, after all, is not only a profession. It is also a culture. And cultures survive through conversations as much as through objects.

This becomes particularly visible in our drawing culture. Architects often speak about drawing styles as evidence of consistency: a signature, a recognisable identity, a logo disguised as representation. We accumulated drawings instead. We think and theorise through them. For us, the value of a type of drawing resides in its intellectual ambition and capacity—in the architecture one could not think without it. Collages. Single-line drawings. Wireframes. Buildings. Photographs of buildings. Each form emerged from a different question. Each one attacked a different problem. Each one contradicted and complemented the previous one.

The single-line drawing perhaps represents the purest reduction. A wall became a line. Thickness disappeared. Material disappeared. Construction disappeared. Only spatial ambition remained. In a profession increasingly obsessed with information, those drawings deliberately knew less, and somehow understood more. The wireframes emerged later, partly from fascination with Itsuko Hasegawa and her relatives, and partly from a desire to see everything simultaneously. Plans, sections and elevations all visible at once. Not sequentially, but together. Not as separate drawings, but as one continuous object. The project became transparent. Architecture became a network of relationships rather than an assembly of rooms.

The wireframe was less interested in appearance than in totality. Its ambition was strange: to see the project as a complete organism despite its matter, to produce an image that behaved more like thought than representation. The irony is that these experiments gradually moved us away from collage. Collage had offered freedom. Wireframes offered structure. Collage suggested narratives. Wireframes suggested systems. Collage was space before construction. Wireframes were rhetoric before matter.

The transition reveals something central about our work. We became increasingly interested in relationships rather than objects, in systems as much as forms, in types as much as exceptions, in architecture as crystallized thought rather than architecture as flat image. At least temporarily. Images never truly disappeared. They simply changed shape. Photography also became increasingly important. Photographic thinking matters to us not because it documents architecture, but because it produces architecture. Kazuo Shinohara wrote that what exists is not a real house but a fictional space. Indeed, a building is rarely experienced by more than a handful of people. The building occupies a site. Its images occupy another, arguably a larger one. Buildings age. Images remain suspiciously young. The real house is only a part of the fictional space.

This is why our conversations with Francisco Ascensão, Giulietta Margot, Rory Gardiner and other photographers never feel secondary. They are not documenting our work. They are participating in its construction. They are extending it, interpreting it, transforming it, completing it. The camera is not an observer. It is a co-author. Architecture has always depended on representation. We assume that fact openly. The photograph is not evidence. It is fiction. A productive and necessary fiction. Carefully choreographed, and embedded in the texture of life.

The camera edits reality. The architect edits reality. The two activities are remarkably similar. A project reaches completion not when construction ends, but when somebody reads it. Photographs allow architecture to become portable, immortal, circulated, discussed, misunderstood, influential, survivable. The building matters. Its projection matters more.

A similar sensibility extends to our website. It is an expression of our work and, inevitably, of ourselves. It remains deliberately impractical. Everything appears simultaneously. No hierarchy. No chronology. Always freshly reordered. No necessary distinction between parts and whole. Projects, lenses, and tools intersect. A housing project sits beside an apartment renovation. A promise sits beside a completed building. A plan sits beside a photograph. All projects at the same time. All projects are part of the same rhizomatic construction. All are fractions of an ever-growing archipelago. Everything exists at once, like in a wireframe.

Visitors frequently complain, which is encouraging, because clarity and provocation are not opposites. The website is apparently chaotic. The archive behind it is not. Internally, every drawing, photograph, contract, chart, email and document occupies a precise position inside a meticulously organised system. Externally, everything collapses into one dynamic flat field. The tension between those two conditions is important. Order produces knowledge. Chaos produces discovery. Architecture requires both.

For more than a decade, our subject has remained remarkably stable: housing. Single-family housing. Collective housing. Private housing. Public housing. Re-use. New construction. Cheap. Urban and suburban. Small, medium, large. Housing again. And again. And again. We have spent years addressing essentially the same question. Three bedrooms. Two bathrooms. Kitchen. Living room. Occasionally a garage. Increasingly a home office. The brief barely changes. The budget is almost always insufficient. The context remains unfertile. The challenge remains identical: how to produce difference from repetition, how to transform certainty into possibility, how to make the familiar strange.

This obsession led us repeatedly toward Japan: to Shinohara, Hasegawa, Ito, Sakamoto, Taki, and beyond. Over and over. Their work continues to provide a framework through which housing can be understood not as a functional machine, but as a cultural proposition. How to think through main spaces and secondary spaces without falling into ready-made recipes. How to liberate form from function as a sole dictator. How to make spaces which are freer, plural, both more effective and more affective. Recently, Elli Mosayebi suggested that dwelling cannot be reduced to the mechanical performance of sleeping, washing, cooking and eating. We agree entirely. Housing should not be reducible to activities. It is about possibilities. Not efficiency, but life with all its dynamisms and contradictions.

The Japanese architects we admire understood this profoundly. A house was a work of art, a spatial argument, a social proposition, a cultural statement. Never simply a container. Some ideas reverberate. Others become unbearable, because our work frequently begins with humble realities: limited budgets, dry regulations, generic suburbia and the conventions of good taste. Our clients are normal people and desire convention. Their motivations and motifs are rarely aligned with ours. As such, we have to find our own mantras to fight the endless battles a project brings.

Suzuko Yamada described our recent houses as being closer to songs than essays, and that feels peculiarly accurate. Their ambitions are spatial, but also atmospheric and intuitive. Yet, our ongoing works remain concerned with space, but increasingly through explicit intellectual operations, compositional systems and economic arguments. If the current houses could be songs, what follows is less improvised, and more composed. Maybe this is because our attention is increasingly directed towards collective housing. Partly because everything surrounding us demands it. Partly because we finally see some potential there. The buildings we are producing now often contain three, five, eight or ten apartments. They are modest. Almost anonymous. Which makes them important. They are not landmarks. They are urban fabric. Rice and potatoes. The everyday substance from which cities are built. They have facades, typologies, common spaces, thresholds and collective negotiations. They produce streets and images of streets.

Within this ongoing series, apartment types have become an obsession. Because of it, we keep returning to some strands of Zurich architecture: to an economically and disciplinarily rich scene, to housing as an intellectual project, to the plan, to the typical unit, to the typical floor plan, to the flowing space that merges day areas and circulations, to dwelling through transversality, to logical efficiency and poetic articulation. We test it in practice. We teach it in school. We argue about it continuously. In Portugal, we do it almost alone. The local context is arid: no real scene, no energy, no understanding of its own irrelevance. Lost in time. A few young exceptions are trying to change that, but it will take time. Meanwhile, three public housing projects are moving forward. Our first competition wins: trojan horses. More than 250 apartments for as many families. An entirely different scale. A different game. Almost urban. Certainly political.

The lessons learned from single-family houses remain relevant. The small informs the large. The large informs the small. The relationship remains reciprocal. Consequently, despite these larger opportunities, we continue accepting apartment renovation commissions. Other practices tend to abandon them. We deliberately do not. Small projects remain laboratories: fast, direct, affordable, investigational. A place where ideas can be tested before becoming responsibilities. A place where we can explore economic poetry immediately. A place where architecture can still behave irresponsibly. That remains more valuable than ever.

Parallel to all this, we write. Increasingly. Perhaps excessively. The four of us wrote PhDs, largely because we were provoked to, not because academia offered certainty. Also, because architecture demands explanation. We wanted to understand better why we did what we did. We wanted to put words on patterns, exorcize some obsessions, contradictions, references and failures. We keep realising that architecture is inevitably rhetorical because inevitably a matter of thought. Projects embody arguments. Buildings narrate. Drawings need reasons. Writing is part of the design toolbox, a method of constructing meaning. We write about our work. We write about ourselves. Sometimes we write about others. This is at times risky: to criticise, validate, interpret, position. Yet architecture depends on those acts. Culture is constructed through judgement. We participate carefully, always aware that our perspective remains partial, that every text is another fiction. This one is no exception.

And then there are the babies. Seven of them. In three and a half years. Again, with no strategic plan, no manifesto, no competition brief. Just seven human beings appearing with remarkable efficiency. Their arrival coincided suspiciously with our professional maturity. Architecture suddenly became less dramatic. Deadlines became less important. Publications became less important. Buildings became less important. Not irrelevant, just correctly scaled. Children are not projects, and children introduce perspective to all projects. Something architecture rarely provides. For years, we worried about being taken seriously. Now we worry about school schedules.

For years, we imagined architecture as the centre of existence. Now it occupies a healthier position. Still important, just not absolute. Perhaps that is where fala finds itself today. Not at the beginning. Not at the end. Somewhere in between. With something to say and some means to say it. No longer a promise. Not yet a conclusion. Maybe living its best years. Still fascinated by drawings. Still fascinated by photographs. Still fascinated by buildings. Still fascinated by architecture. Still believing that a line can change a room, that a room can change a building, that a building can change a street, that a lens can change a narrative, and that occasionally, despite all evidence to the contrary, architecture can still change something.