fala

FABLE

“The Ugly Duckling” is a literary fairy tale written by Hans Christian Andersen in 1843. It tells the story of a young bird born in a farmyard, immediately judged as awkward, ugly, and different, mocked and rejected as it moves through fields, marshes, and seasons, until time and a change of context allow it to recognise itself as being something greater than assumed previously. This book adopts Andersen’s narrative as a working metaphor, yet with a different dynamic, a different type of optimism, in a sense both quirkier and more contemplative. The title takes it literally, while also alluding to the ideas of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown: a name for buildings that never became beautiful.

The Ugly Ducks are a breed of anonymous and diverse residential buildings constructed in Porto roughly between 1960 and 1990—an interval with concrete edges, between the spread of medium-rise construction and Portugal’s entry into the European Union which brought in new norms. They are shaped by recurring types of plots, evolutions in planning regulations, and prosaic socio-economic circumstances. These buildings are “ugly in a good way”, yet they are ‘ducks’, not ‘ducklings’—fully mature elements of the city fabric, ordinary enough now to have become invisible, yet indispensable in our minds. They are the kind of buildings nobody in Porto would celebrate, yet if they disappeared the city wouldn’t be itself anymore. The tale of the Ugly Ducks is therefore not one of revenge or transfiguration, but one about the tension between humility and exuberance—about architecture’s capacity to hold opposites together—about the city as a cohesive herd of stubbornly individual creatures.

LIMBO

We sometimes develop a disproportionate affection for buildings that are strange, unrefined, or even blatantly ugly. Often these buildings have something to teach us. Observed long enough, their awkwardness becomes vulnerability, cuteness. This study emerges from such affection. The Ugly Ducks are not ‘high design’, yet they are consistently proud, voluntary, resolute in their clumsiness. Today, they are often sandwiched between more generic neighbours—neatly rendered, efficiently compliant, and conventionally tedious.

Much has been written and said about the vernacular, about architecture without architects, especially in Porto. In parallel, much has been written and said about the vanity of architects, about their supposedly limited capacity to erase themselves for the benefit of the small expanse of built environment each of them is responsible for. We would argue that this responsibility cannot be only submission to the forces pre-existing on a site (regulatory ones, commercial ones, climatic ones, etc), and thus the built environment needs decisive and ultimately subjective inputs by a type of people one can only call architects. At the margins of this debate, the Ugly Ducks sit in a valuable limbo: they’re not exactly vernacular architecture without authors, nor are they exactly generic or authorial modern architectures.

Perhaps this is why they wouldn’t sit squarely in most discourses of architectural theory. Many of their authors are draftsmen, some are engineers, and even the ones with higher architectural education are understandably forgotten. Yet these buildings form a vast and recognisable portion of the city fabric. Not old enough to be read with nostalgia by most, nor stylistically ambitious enough to be remarked, they exist in a condition of quiet anonymity, increasingly altered, neutralised, or erased through periodic waves of insensitive renovation. Still because they learn equally from local craft and globalised methods, they are also hybrids, chimeras. Sometimes comfortably nuanced, sometimes oddly marvellous, but in all cases providing a vigorous yet restrained background to the city—an ambient architecture.

This book observes them collectively for the first time, searching for the same type of revelation that ambient music can offer when listened to on headphones rather than in the intended environmental mingling. We found some shared tropes and a specific type of hedonism. A language made of care towards proportion, repetition, colour, craft, domesticity; where value resides not in refinement or exception, but in consistency, vitality, and a stubborn generosity in face of the city. The Ugly Ducks were just waiting, fully formed as a gang, for a different moment in which to be seen. Perhaps they can now operate as a valid and contemporary architectural reference, not in competition with the mythology of the ‘Porto School’ but as its repressed subconscious, and one that certainly has parallel iterations in many other cities.

Time presses though. These buildings constitute a fabric that, due to its age, is now being rapidly overlaid with indiscriminate thermal insulation, generic window frames, and desaturated corrective plaster. The Ducks are an endangered species, and a certain tissue is eroding.

Ultimately this book assigns meaning to buildings that are, in positive terms, banal, insisting that in some cases meaning is not a property of exception, but of accumulation. So, while only a few of the Ducks if any are worth preserving as museum specimen, reflections on what their qualities contributed to the city and how such qualities can be maintained via new buildings and transformations is long overdue. The tender and somewhat ‘ugly’ bits of the city make the perfect ones shine brighter. This is not a call for preservation but a call for vitality, and for a training of the eyes that allows us to see it.

WALK

fala’s relationship with the Ugly Ducks began more than a decade ago, almost at the atelier’s inception. For years, without a defined plan, buildings were pointed at, collectively discussed, learned from, and informally labelled. In formal terms, the project can be traced back to two academic exercises we conducted at the Architecture Faculties of TU Münster and TU Munich, which produced a first, overwhelming yet too limited act of documentation. What followed was longer and wore our soles out much more.

This book comprises a photographic and documentary survey of approximately one thousand residential buildings—not a catalogue, but a carefully curated collection of faces, a series of original photographs of forgotten façades, labelled with their dates and authors. We understand it as an inevitably partial endeavour, meaning that some of the criteria of curation are objective, some rather intuitive. All photographs were taken by Giulietta Margot, a Swiss artist-photographer with a disarmingly punk sensibility, with whom fala has collaborated over several years. The images were produced specifically for this research through a coherent system of action defined a priori, conceived almost as a conceptual art piece and executed through structured photographic strolls. Between 2024 and 2025, these long walks systematically crossed the entire city, covering all streets of Porto. The protocol was precise yet elastic: we intuitively pointed out selected buildings while registering their addresses, while Giulietta responded immediately with reactive photographs. Although some of the buildings were familiar acquaintances, the majority of the selection was resolved on site, through direct confrontation with the city and its ordinary architectures.

Giulietta’s gaze introduced a necessary distance, making the precision of the collective language under observation legible. More than that, it let us finally see the Ugly Ducks in the city. (Apart from in photographs, are we architects ever able to see the city as anything other than an accumulation of buildings?) Rem Koolhaas once wrote of the photographer Nobuyoshi Araki that his lens “gives dignity to ‘anything’”—a “savage suspension of judgment revealing pathos, intensity and beauty.” “He is literally, unbelievably optimistic,” he added.

The Ugly Ducks undoubtedly required similar optimism. Accordingly, the fully analogue process imposed a single, decisive click, preserving the rhythm of walking and precluding post-editing, correction, or reframing. All photographs were taken with a Contax T2 camera and 35mm colour film. The interval between pointing and photographing was consistently limited to a few seconds, producing rapid, almost impressionistic responses.

Depending on contingent circumstances, some buildings appear alone, while others are captured in pairs or trios when directly adjacent. Altered, plastered, or irreversibly impaired buildings were not photographed; the same applying to those covered in scaffolding, in the process of revision. Flash was used whenever deemed desirable; urban noise, visual interference, and commonly unacceptable obstructions were not eliminated but accepted as part of the operation. Angles diverged deliberately, with no ambition towards a pre-imposed classical verticality, frontal composition, or homogeneous representation. Photographs were taken on the move, and the immediacy of the act allowed a certain negligence in the image to mirror the negligence often attributed to the objects depicted—a political decision in all senses of the word, so an aesthetic one too.

The processing and scanning were carried out locally, always in the same inexpensive neighbourhood shop. The original 2×3 format of the images was preserved in the book. All photographs are reproduced full bleed, occupying the entire surface of the page, rotated when taken in landscape format, and maintained at a uniform size, even when the buildings depicted differ in scale or fail to occupy a consistent portion of the frame. In this way, despite their documentary function, each image remains as a base unit and retains a measure of individual artistic autonomy.

The sequence of the photographs follows the order in which they were taken. The city is reassembled through the logic of the walk, the rhythm of observation, and the contingencies of the photographic act. Only in a secondary reading do the municipal archival records reveal a different chronology: design and completion dates appear out of sequence. Lived experience and administrative time never coincide. Altogether, the book attempts to convey not only the Ugly Ducks themselves, but also the process of encountering them. Each page a step in the city, with curious eyes.

STAMP

After the completion of the photographic walks, once the full set of building images had been brought from negatives to computer drives and test-prints, archival research was undertaken to organise and validate the inclusion of each photographed building. To the criteria of expression and location were added those of time and (finally revealed) authorship. In parallel, access to municipal archives enabled the examination of documents and drawings concealed behind the façades, revealing patterns that extend beyond exterior appearance—secondary to the study, yet nonetheless relevant for understanding recurring tropes and latent consistencies.

Over the course of one year, the municipal archive was visited on a weekly basis, allowing consultation of nearly two thousand archived permit applications and respective licensing files. This slow process yielded dates and names. For each building, the author-on-record’s identity and role—architect, engineer, or contractor—were confirmed, together with the year in which the building application was submitted, stamp-approved, and the date of completion, defined here as the issuance of the license of use. On average, most buildings required three to four years from initial application to completion, a relatively short span that compresses design and construction into a near-contiguous timeframe.

The municipal foraging confirmed the photographed buildings to be largely confined to the period between 1960 and 1990. Only a very small number of buildings fell outside this range, suggesting that the intuitive process of selection and photographing already operated within a factual chronological boundary, even before it was explicitly defined. These temporal exceptions were subsequently removed from the final publication. The buildings were authored mainly by engineers, with only a third signed by architects. In a smaller number of cases, authorship was assumed directly by contractors, with the assumed presence of (sometimes shared) draftsmen in all processes. Design, calculation, and construction overlapped. Architects were present, but they were not the sole or main agents shaping the architectural expression of the Ugly Ducks.

The resulting list of authors-on-record was extensive, comprising a total of 259 names, many recurring. Most names appear only once, some recur up to twenty times, while one striking outlier is responsible for nearly eighty buildings. In numerous cases, repetition was unsurprising: specific tropes, material strategies, and compositional gestures became recognisable even before archival confirmation. At the same time, within the mass of largely anonymous production, a small number of unexpected prominent local figures emerged, represented by lesser-known or unpublished works.

The archival survey also revealed a number of absences. Several of the photographed buildings could no longer be matched to complete municipal records, either because process files had been lost, fragmented, or removed from the archive over time. These buildings remain part of the photographic sequence, but their authorship and precise chronology could not be verified. Within the publication, they therefore appear as anonymous objects, preserving the traces of a city whose memory is, like its fabric, inevitably incomplete.

The density of the archival folders supplied a scientific body of data that anchors, and counterbalances, the immersive visual material produced a priori. It appears as a parallel layer of information distributed across all images, indicating years and authors, and further organised within an index that allows several distances of reading. The publication can thus be read from two entry points: the stroll or the data, the immeasurable or the objective.

GAME

In general, the Ugly Ducks play a quite direct game of order, symmetry, and repetition. In particular, they introduce calculated misalignments, errors, and exceptions. They follow a reduced set of housing typologies, most often on narrow and deep plots, under maximum heights prescribed by authorities. Their compositions are debatable, and every detail remains open to scrutiny: handrails, coloured motifs, small-scale formal quirks. Some façades present themselves as direct expressions of structure and function; others appear to hesitate, as if attempting to say something more. They are buildings that oscillate between modesty and pride. The focus of the study lies in these urban expressions—predominantly the frontal façade, with blind sides and backsides that remain secret— a study of composition, geometry, and proportion, alongside observations on structure, colour, pattern, and materiality. It ultimately acts as a celebration of architectural composition at a moment when the expression of buildings appears increasingly streamlined, absorbed by the Excel sheets of the market, and the sterile conventions of good taste.

The Ugly Ducks’ collective language emerged without canon or any identifiable school of thought. It most probably solidified through mutual observation, imitation, and a shared way of building that spread through the city like a plague. Not only because of the prevailing spirit of the period—particularly in its earlier half—but also due to the significant presence of engineers, contractors and draftsmen as drawing authors, it can be broadly inferred that the initial formation of this shared language was often pragmatic. Many design decisions emerge, above all, as deeply practical responses: responses to constraint, from which a logical expression took shape.

The study began by focusing on the most caricatural buildings: structures less than six metres wide and rising four, five, sometimes six storeys (0039, 0518, 0756). In the first years of observation, these alone were considered the “Ugly Ducks”, a definition restricted to constructions with this exaggerated vertical proportion. Recurring elements in Porto’s urban fabric, they are the product of the city’s fragmented land subdivision and usually replace the typical one- or two-storey nineteenth century bourgeois houses. This typology thus forms the core of the sample. In these tall, slender volumes, with blind and neglected party walls and forgotten rear façades, the archive visits confirmed what was anticipated: plans are consistently compressed, constricted at the centre by vertical circulation, struggling to organise two primary rooms on each façade, resulting in recurrent, squeezed typologies. Even so, the kitchen almost always appears as an isolated, autonomous room, sometimes with its own balcony, at other times internalised within the apartment. Equally recurrent is the conflict between the street’s urban alignment and the diagonal alignment of plots derived from much earlier property divisions, a clash that forces internal organisation—and occasionally the façades themselves—to assume and express this divergence of directions.

As the photographic walks progressed, however, the scope expanded. The final investigation includes not only the initial slender volumes, but also a broader set of examples: wider buildings, corner buildings, or enfilades, with varied proportions. The reason for this enlargement is straightforward: the authorship and architectural expression under study were not confined to buildings of the original proportion. Increased scale produced specific manifestations of some of the most recognisable tropes, while introducing new ones (0038, 0110, 0782, 1021). With longer elevation planes and more varied urban dispositions, it became possible to more clearly register and understand the common language under analysis, to grasp its elasticity and its range of possibilities.

TROPES

The regular choice of façade materials follows the same pragmatism. Ceramic mosaic tiles, used systematically, are economical yet durable; dark marble cladding at ground level is equally resistant, but introduces a sense of nobility precisely where the building meets the public realm (0218, 0293, 1021). A similar logic underlies the persistent use of traditional pitched ceramic roofs constructed over a reinforced concrete roof slab (0131, 0212, 0694). To be perfectly clear: it is not the linear concrete structures whose apex are sloped. These are additional and structurally autonomous sloped constructions built on top of the last horizontal slab. Modernity and inherited tropes are superimposed rather than synthesised. No irony here, just a sound, cheap, and readily available solution—an additional protective hat against rain and sunrays. This hat is almost always extended by a modest overhang, slightly cantilevered from the façade, shielding it from direct exposure, defining a recurring down-to-earth cornice.

Balcony railings are consistently well designed and emphatically expressive (0001, 0023, 0128). Normally in metal, and sometimes with hammered glass infills, they remain visually permeable to allow light to pass through, often capped with a bold strip of noble wood, offering residents tactile contact with a warm and familiar material. The balconies themselves are usually minimal in depth, projecting beyond the legal footprint and frequently cut at 45 degrees at the corners, a direct consequence of specific property limit regulations (0073). At mid-height, however, the railings often widen, creating enough depth to accommodate chairs and quietly extend the domestic territory. Approaching the 1980s, balconies gradually become solid: parapets rise to between sixty and eighty centimetres, topped only by a thin metal handrail, and their expression becomes deliberately more muted (0265, 0217, 0947). Less frequent, yet still recurrent, is the use of thick, solid screens—approximately two metres high—placed in front of kitchens and/or their balconies, designed to conceal drying laundry and to mask what was understood as a non-noble programme (0438).

Special attention is given to numerous small depth variations—often no more than one or two centimetres—systematically distributed across the façades, and most frequent in the earlier half of the period under study (0428). These minimal offsets demonstrate a precise care for articulation: slight shifts between floor slabs, full-height opaque walls, spandrels below windows, or marginally thicker shutter boxes replacing walls above openings, are repeatedly employed to structure façade compositions (0236, 0293, 0609). The motivations behind these adjustments are largely practical, stemming from the need to accommodate appropriate material thicknesses—brickwork, wall build-ups, shutter mechanisms, yet careful and cared for. This clear recurrence is such that it constitutes a specific language within the broader language of the Ugly Ducks, a sub-chapter that could become an isolated study on its own (0071). Through repetition and variation, these subtle articulations in depth persist, becoming increasingly self-aware and occasionally self-celebratory as they extend towards the 1980s, becoming something else, bolder, at the approach of the 1990s (0306, 0319, 0585).

Symmetry—and its deliberate suspension—also plays a role. In most cases, a degree of compositional balance is sought, even when it is imperfect or strained (0152). At times, the building volume extends beyond the property boundary through cantilevers of up to one and a half metres (0409, 0410). Some façades are radically minimal, defined by little more than successive planes of glass and ceramic; others verge on excess, over-articulated and unresolved (0470). In many instances, the façade operates as a direct narrative device, openly declaring the programme concealed behind it through explicit formal cues. This didactic quality oscillates between carelessness and precision. Marquises, in particular, occupy an ambiguous position: sometimes crude, sometimes refined, they prompt uncertainty as to whether they were part of the original conception or later accretions (0283, 0390, 0509). A small number of curtain façades—cheap yet strangely engaging—also appear (0444, 0482), alongside occasional flower pots embedded within the volumetric fragmentation of balcony edges, frequently empty of any flowers (0651).

Although certain frequencies prevail—soft pastel tones being the most common—colour varies considerably. Some authors insist on specific palettes, as evidenced by César Máximo’s recurring use of three shades of bluish pale green (0033, 0185, 0674, 1022), while others deviate more freely, venturing towards purples and less conventional choices (0451). Colours, and materials, are very freely combined. Patterns within ceramic elements appear intermittently, sometimes as a secondary refinement, at other times as the primary compositional gesture (0025, 0465).

Yet, when colour is considered closely, one persistent mystery remains: the repeated application of a very precise Bordeaux tone to the undersides of balconies (0599). Its recurrence suggests less a stylistic choice than a product of its time—perhaps a specific waterproofing material available only in that particular hue or an approximation to the visual effect of dark wood claddings, typical of more noble constructions. Elsewhere, thick plaster renders are used to mark floor slabs, deliberately disconnecting colours and textures and reinforcing horizontal stratification (0153, 0459). Windows and ceramic mosaics frequently align to generate moments of tension, once again calculated. The overwhelming majority of façades adopt the horizontal tension produced by the demarcation of floor slabs, with a secondary vertical rhythm articulated through wall reliefs and openings (0473, 0732). More rarely, but usually with striking compositional clarity, elevations produce a curtain-like effect, in which the openings appear as if suspended to horizontal bands—perhaps the abstraction of a motif present in some late Manueline architectures of the city (0392, 0528). Some authors propose recurring strong, clear lines and figures, like Nélson de Almeida Mota (0016, 0103, 0398, 0920). In other cases, particularly throughout the 1980s, a single-coloured mosaics relentlessly and generically envelop entire buildings, enforcing monolithic readings (0217, 078, 1014). Variation and repetition coexist within this strategy, allowing colour to oscillate between articulation and totalising effect.

There are, finally, moments that resist interpretation altogether: peculiar, erratic gestures on which the collection doesn’t give clues. Their presence is neither corrected nor explained, and they make for some of the most fascinating buildings. Sui generis compositions, singular cases, expand the range of possibilities, as in the two antagonists facing each other across Rua Aires de Ornelas (0310, 0588), the unexpected volume on Rua da Meditação (0509), or the enigmatic play of red squares on Rua Anselmo Brancamp (0647).

In the end, this collective language is assembled from small decisions rather than grand intentions, from suppliers and centimetres rather than concepts. What begins as necessity—material thicknesses, waterproofing, legal setbacks, economic limits—gradually acquires expressive capacity. Over time, repetition stabilises these responses into recognisable motifs, and pragmatism mutates into character.

COMPANY

Three voices accompany ours in the book. The first belongs to a fundamental actress in the project: Giulietta Margot. If fala’s texts emerge from the heart of the research to project outwards, hers follows an opposite direction. As an occasional visitor, she has an approach of the city untainted by familiarity. On the other hand, the sheer volume of photographs she produced for this book has made her, almost by accident, one of the sharpest readers of Porto's visual reality today—a role we are grateful she accepted. Her text reflects on this odd situation and on her process.

The other two texts come from voices that can also be framed as part of the project’s genealogy. Both authors are architects, and produced books that served as important precedents for the Ugly Ducks: Eric Lapierre’s ‘Guide d’architecture. Paris 1900–2008’ and Atelier Bow-wow’s ‘Made in Tokyo’offered different models for looking systematically at the architecture of a city, and were present, even if sometimes unconsciously, at the inception of this research. Lapierre asks what is held in a practitioner’s studious gaze at the city, and what values have the imaginary built in this process. Kaijima, in turn, places the Ugly Ducks against the specific backdrop of Porto, its transformations and its ordinary residential fabric, while reflecting on what it means to identify, collect, name, and study such an extensive body of apparently unremarkable buildings. Their contributions thus return to two of the project’s starting points, while asking, from different positions, what architecture can learn from looking closely at the city that already exists.

It was crucial for us to discuss the contents of the book with people who are simultaneously great practitioners and sharp readers of the urban fact. We thank them on behalf of the Ugly Ducks.

After years of discussion, the book is to be published in late 2026. It came together through the invaluable help and seemingly endless energy of Ana Catarina Silva, and the clarity of João Araújo and Rita Huet’s graphic design at And Atelier. From there, the stacks of pages will travel the world thanks to Exemplo. The many hours spent digging through the city hall’s archives owe a lot to the generous help of its municipal team, and, in a pleasingly circular turn of events, the book was partly funded by the city itself through the Pláka programme. All in all, the Ugly Ducks have been as much a collective effort in book form than in built form.

CODA

Looking at its subject as a whole, the book portrays an architecture that is neither accidental nor weighed down by the imperatives of its various actors. What might initially appear as inconsistency or crudeness reveals itself as a coherent and open-ended system shaped by shared constraints and a tacit collective intelligence. The Ugly Ducks do not articulate a manifesto, nor do they need one.

The research they led us to was, rather, an act of observation and translation: reading existing narratives in order to trouble and reassess some small parcels of knowledge. This book is, in a sense, a by-product of this process—a fragile collection of peculiar faces that were anonymous to us at the start. They have not changed. Our eyes have.