FALA is a Portuguese office based in Oporto, led by Filipe Magalhães (1987), Ana Luísa (1988) and Ahmed Belkhodja (1990). With previous professional experiences with architects such as Harry Gugger, SANAA, Toyo Ito, Bow-Wow and Obra, their paths crossed for the first time in Switzerland. They decided to open their own practice in 2013.
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Where everything could go wrong, they were resilient enough to break through and win their deserved recognition and admiration not only nationally but also internationally. Three years have passed and the growing workload has enabled them to expand and open a new satellite office in Lisbon. With lectures and exhibitions all over Europe, they are also guest professors at Bratislava Faculty of Architecture.
FALA represents the ideal of ownership that most of the young architects dream of: it is the proof that architecture is “still alive” and that there is work for those who are persistent enough. They understand, with admirable clarity, the field of constrains and rhetorical contradictions that our profession is full of. FALA has an impressive “Internet” presence and they understand how to make the most out of it.
The current gentrification process in Oporto and Lisbon, motivated by a touristic speculative bubble, led to a huge private investment on the renovation of the old centers, targeting mostly housing projects. It is curious that several architecture offices, like FALA, are developing the same projects, but none are as well known as them. Why would that be?
I would say that it is because they have already found an identity.
Their “collages” have landed in art galleries in Paris, Panama and New York. Because of all that, we decided to understand a bit more what drives them. This interview was the result.
FAUP and ETH were the core faculties where you learned about architecture. Do you see yourselves as a “product” of your University formation? What was the crucial moment that made you decide to open your own studio? Or did you always dream of having your own practice?
Every architecture student starts studying architecture with the idea of having his or her own practice in mind, even if he or she doesn’t know it. At least, we are sure we did and never lost that clear notion that this would happen to us at some point. The crucial moment, the “opportunity”, or even the “excuse” to do it so soon, was our first client: a small commission, a renovation of a 55m2 apartment in Lisbon, for a foreign investor. It was an almost irrelevant project but triggered everything. It was the “click”. Our schools defined us (on a basic level), that is clear, and we were lucky enough to study in some of the best European Faculties of Architecture. Still, they were not everything: our professional experiences in Switzerland and Japan, our continuous interest in new names and references, our traveling through Asia, Europe and America and our recent positions as teachers, among other milestones, were important as well. An architect is not just an academic product: the sum of all parts is crucial. Architecture schools are just the beginning of a long path.
As you said already, an architect is not just an academic product, although I consider that good architecture will always be identified as “academic”, in a sense of freethinking. But sometimes it is just pure theoretical project. Do you consider that unbuilt architecture is also architecture? Is the process itself more important then the constructed idea?
We could refer to the Metabolists, who defined a whole architecture movement without a single built building, or the Plan Voisin (Le Corbusier), which was (un)fortunately never built, as great examples of pure architecture without any physical confirmation. As such, we can argue that yes: it is possible to define architecture without a “body”. Nevertheless, there is a unique beauty in how architecture is perceived when confronted with the 1:1 scale, that a drawing can’t provide. It is in your guts, deeper than your brain. You can touch it, feel it… Maybe the first kind of architecture could be labeled as “academic”. The second is real. What you call the “process”, the rhetoric behind the architecture, is absolutely fundamental. Architecture without reason (and planned contradiction) is not more than mere construction. As architects we can’t just be builders: the “why” is as important as the “what”.
You have built so far 10 projects and 20 other projects are on-going or in construction. As most of them are low budget and renovation projects, what have you learn through this process? Do you have everything planned or do you leave a lot to be defined on site?
Most of projects we have built so far were refurbishments of some sort. As such, regardless of the amount of detail you put into the projects, there is a lot to be defined on site since demolitions reveal surprises all the time and old structures are not as rigorous as autocad might have suggested. We try to define the projects as much as possible before construction, but it is very common for us that such decisions are conceptual until some point: they do not have a specific detail, brand or material, but an intention. In that sense, what is really crucial for us is to define the idea and the intention behind that detail and not the detail itself, allowing for some tectonic flexibility. Low budgets are a constant, but not a terrible constraint. Each project has an “angle” that makes it unique and we try to do the best with each opportunity. We spend almost as much time in small renovations as we spend in bigger commissions. We took almost two months to design a birdhouse. Ideas are the driving force of the projects because they need a certain degree of rhetoric, of intellectual interest. Otherwise, they become random creations, based on personal taste: which is terrible. We have a bigger agenda above the projects: each house and each apartment is a commission from a client but it is also an opportunity for us, as authors, to understand our own field of interests and our own position towards the discipline. At this point, with almost 20 projects under construction and on the table, we are dealing daily with this discussion on what connects and separates each of these “objects” from a central core. At such young age, we believe this is the most important task we are faced with: understanding who we want to be and what we want to achieve in the next decade.
You are much admired by a lot of people around the world, especially among students and young practices. Your representation of architecture, through collages, is also a key aspect of this recognition. Aren’t you afraid of being “stuck” within what defines you?
Our practice is still too young to be labeled. We don’t do what we do because other people approve it or “like” it: we do it because it is what we believe we should do. We have true pleasure in our working process and we have a very clear understanding of how and why we do it. We don’t feel stuck, quite the opposite.
So, you do not believe that your work is influenced by today social media platforms. Even though your Facebook page has more “likes” (around 16 000) then other more established offices, with active Facebook pages, like COBE (11 700), Christian Kerez (8600), or even 51N4E (1300). As Alejandro Zaera-Polo defined – in his El Croquis article “Well into the 21st Century: The Architectures of Post-Capitalism?” – “(…) the emerging practices are often engaged in this re-circulation of archetypes and languages. (…) now effectively embedded in the collective imagination as linguistic references”. How do you comment this transformation of today’s importance of the immediate perceived image?
We were born inside the Internet era: it is only natural that we are “fluent” in it. But, honestly, the amount of Facebook likes on a page says very little about anything at all. Society puts too much pressure on these platforms but they mean very little for the discipline: they just dissipate images, nothing else. When it comes to Architecture with a capital A, true references are Siza, Shinohara, Markli and Asplund. These names, not the social media platforms, matter (and none of them has an Instagram account). We believe architecture is made of architecture and these names are the ones providing us answers for the questions we didn’t know we wanted to ask.
The Garage House is one of your most interesting built projects so far, in my opinion. Even though it is your “less designed project”: Three curtains attached to the beams; a curved wall that bounds the toilets; and a shifted kitchen counter-top. Everything was apparently decided in order to be as flexible and informal as possible. This informality is something that you have been pursuing since your very first day. How important is it for your design process?
Jony Ive says that it is extremely complicated to produce something that feels extremely simple. The garage house was exactly that. During the design process for the project we went around all the possibilities to end up where we started: the most humble and honest spatial intervention. We had amazing clients, who trusted us and had “faith” that that would be the direction to follow. In the end we are really happy with the result. Informality is indeed very important for us. It balances, sometimes, the excessive rigidness of the rhetorical side of our thinking. We design spaces – perimeters – but we won’t live in them. As such, we need to give a certain distance: a space for the unknown. It is almost as if we would be discussing parametric architecture: we define conceptual guidelines but we let the values change and we accept the results. We can’t define everything, especially what happens after we leave, and this is a way of letting it go.
Still on the Garage House project: the strong presence of the old black Fiat500 , on the back, reminds me very much, of these historical photography’s of Le Corbusier House in Weissenhof, or even the Pierre Koenig Case Study House nº22. In both of them, they want to show the house as an “object” to be desired and, as well, a reflection of an ideal way of living. Is there a statement by adding the car to that space? Or was it just for fun?
It was mostly for fun. The car was not even from the clients, who actually have no car, and was added just for the photos. We felt it was necessary to have an open mind about the space and, if this was a “garage-house”, a car was almost mandatory to explain the spatial concept… The true statement was the spatial one. The car is, in such space, as relevant as the kitchen counter, the yellow chairs or the pots and plants.
You also have done some installations and pure theoretical proposals. In my opinion, the “office tower we don’t need” is one of your most interesting theoretical projects. It is – arrogant and naïve, silly and intelligent, imprecise and sharp – all at the same time. It expresses very well this field of constant contradiction that defines our practice. How do you deal with the contradiction?
To be precise, the best thing we can do is quote Venturi’s introduction to Complexity and Contradiction: “I like complexity and contradiction in architecture. I do not like the incoherence or arbitrariness of incompetent architecture nor the precious intricacies of picturesqueness or expressionism. (…) I like elements which are hybrid rather than ‘pure,’ compromising rather than ‘clean,’ distorted rather than ‘straightforward,’ ambiguous rather than ‘articulated,’ perverse as well as impersonal, boring as well as ‘interesting,’ conventional rather than ‘designed,’ accommodating rather than excluding, redundant rather than simple, vestigial as well as innovating, inconsistent and equivocal rather than direct and clear. I am for messy vitality over obvious unity”. We depend tremendously on our references. Being them so diverse – from Siza to Markli, from the young Ito to Shinohara, from Venturi to Asplund – the result of our architecture is expected to be contradictory.
As an example, in The House for Three Generations, despite of having an open single plan living room, the clients requested a “separation” between the kitchen and the living room areas. According to them, it could have been a wall, a sliding partition, a piece of cabinetry. We proposed a column: the minimum architectural element to generate a transition, in order to create a spatial hierarchy. That column is not needed for anything else. It doesn’t hold the roof, it doesn’t support any beam, and as a result, it doesn’t touch the ceiling. It is a clear reminder of its purpose: it is a rhetorical element, not a structural one.
The scope of your work is based, most of the time, on simple and pure geometries – square, circle and triangle. Sometimes, this spatial abstraction is completely disconnected from the site or the place where the project is going to be implemented. How can a project belong to a place and to “no place” at the same time?
Since many of our projects started with corrections and transformations of existing structures, we discussed our early projects from the inside-out and each room was thought with its own rhetoric structure. There was little or nothing we could do otherwise. In the current projects, where we are developing the buildings from scratch, the relation to the context is a more relevant topic. Still, as a principle, our new buildings are independent from their context and we don’t feel the need to obey to existing circumstances. We believe that there is a necessity for autonomy: each project should work in its context or in any other, if taken to the limit. This “autism” makes each project an island of its own. Abstract or absolute geometries help us to achieve this non-referential agenda.
What made you feel so attracted to the “naïve art”, or the post-impressionist movement? Considering that most of your “collages” painting references came from that movement.
This “attraction” has a more conceptual basis than an artistic one. When we present a collage to a client, student or anonymous, they discuss an idea, that they clearly understand from such image. When you present a project with a realistic render, we end up discussing details, handles, finishes. The render, like other representation techniques, is an illustration, while the bluntness of the collage focuses all the attention in what matters. The viewer knows that the sofa is not “the sofa” and that the carpet is not “the carpet” and that the cat is not part of the project. With the render, this doesn’t happen. We produce our collages in the beginning of the project, right after the first plans (with whom we always start). After that point, each collage has around 100 variations until it reaches its final form. It evolves with the project: it is a tool, not a final product.
Your “about page” already had a lot of descriptions of what you are and what you do. Now, it just says that you are a naïve practice. What started to be a sine qua non situation had become a statement. Isn’t this naïve attitude a way of escaping the reality? What is your manifesto after all?
Maybe it is because we lose competitions all the time, but we lose them on purpose. You can turn in one direction and make a project that the jury wants – and you might stand a chance of getting a prize or even winning –, or you turn the opposite way and you do what you want, and believe everything is going to be all right. The naivety is also the way we approach a new project. We always think that trying something is more important than doing things “correctly.” Even the simple fact that we decided so early to open an office was a very naive gesture. We often have the feeling that if we don’t take “naive” risks, it won’t get that interesting for us. So we try to let our first innocent ideas become something important. It can actually make for a very complex trajectory of the project, because the project still has to be coherent and make sense in the end. We embrace naivety as a tool and not a burden. When we talk we always sound extremely positive and optimistic, but it’s very difficult to start an office and make it stable, even more in a market like Portugal. As you can imagine, it’s not the most flourishing economy right now: “naive” also because of this. We could be architects with a position in a big office, but we decided to leave that comfort and lose that extra digit in our salary in order to achieve something more important to us.
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Mário David Serrano (Lisbon, 1987) M.Arch. by Universidade Lusíada de Lisboa. After his collaboration with Aires Mateus, in Lisbon, he moved to Zürich, in 2013, to collaborate with EM2N, until the present date. In 2015, he joined Exquisite team, writing periodically interviews and critical articles.
