fala

While most architects of their generation are looking for excuses to avoid Architecture, fala keeps building, producing books, and acquiring new photographers, landscape architects, graphic designers, or whatever/whoever else is required — building a generation of practice around them. Their ambition and commitment to the discipline seems unlimited.

What you see in the pages of this AMAG is the culmination of their Japanese phase: a body of work they have been carefully constructing for ever. Three of the four partners had previous lives in Japan where they lived and worked: Filipe at SANAA; Ana Luisa with Toyo Ito; and Ahmed at Atelier Bow-Wow. More important than those offices, however, are their predecessors: Itsuko Hasegawa, Kazuo Shinohara, and many others who built 250 architectural works in Japan during the second half of the twentieth century, all carefully collected by fala in their substantial 2021 publication ‘1961–1992 Japan’. The partners’ PhDs also delved deeply into Japanese architectural culture from a specific historical period, continuously helping to build the intellectual ammunition for this phase.

While much of the world was in quarantine, fala invested in producing a reference book exposing some of their deepest obsessions to the rest of the world. They are not concerned about revealing their personal library: the publication is nothing less than a careful curation of Ahmed’s magazines. All of the projects featured emerge from the pages of his collection of Japanese architectural journals. Also, most of the houses presented in this magazine could easily belong to that book. For me, they already do. 

fala’s architecture is made for publications like this one. The projects highlighted here already belong to the architectural cult-magazine culture. Some of these buildings will disappear, many are impossible to visit. But the drawings and the photographs will remain for generations to come across pages like the ones you are holding. Always fragmentarily deployed and photographed by different authors, their buildings acquired multiple lives. With each new photographer, a different project seems to emerge. fala expands its already vast architectural production by allowing multiple photographers to critically look at their work: Francisco Ascensão, Giulietta Margot, Rory Gardiner… and even Lera, have all turned their lenses over fala’s work. Under construction, mostly soon after completion, or post-occupancy; straight or tilted; from afar or up close; in analogue, in flash, or even both combined—it does not matter. This was always their plan: proposing images of certain domestic dreams to circulate through magazines around the world.

For 13 years the atelier has been preparing for this moment. In this residential production, they are able to combine their eclectic plans with rich, almost absurd sections; normcore interiors with the baroque; paired-back material palettes with exuberant embellishment; cheap details with decidedly less cheap ones. They have finished the game, or at least the one they were playing. I doubt their Japanese era could get much better. They were already giving an enormous amount of architecture to clients who were not asking for it—I imagine now that they are. And let’s not be naive: a few of the houses featured here are for themselves (or for their friends and family), situations where fala can deploy all of their design vehemence without too many intrusions.

While fala will continue misbehaving in their smaller works, let’s get excited with theirupcominglarger projects. Three upcoming housing blocks will bring some of the best lessons of Swiss residential architecture into the dry Portuguese landscape. Trust me, they will not be as excessive, but they will be very good homes. fala is deeply invested in this new body of work. You may know their Japanese story, but the Swiss one is no different.Theyworked for Harry Gugger in Basel, studied at ETH and EPFL, and now teach extensively at HEAD and at EPFL itself. It is no coincidence that their recent studioin Lausanneis titled‘Good Housing’. They have armysof students testing ideas alongside them after visiting some of the best bourgeois and affordable housing projects in the region. fala will not stop until they deliver some of the finest Swiss housing blocks in and around Porto. We will need to wait for their next monograph to see them, so let’s be patient. These next three projects are just the beginning. Remember, fala does not get distracted.