The exchange with other countries and building cultures is of great importance for the work of the young architects at Fala Atelier. An interview about their experiences in Switzerland and the development of their own signature style – in which renderings are not always used as a linguistic device.

The exchange with other countries and building cultures is of great importance for the work of the young architects at Fala Atelier. An interview about their experiences in Switzerland and the development of their own signature style – in which renderings are not always used as a linguistic tool.

Baumeister: You represent those architects who make the most of their Erasmus experience and the international arena. How important was this experience for you?
Filipe Magalhăes: We studied in Porto and then I went to Ljubljana in Slovenia. Ana didn’t take part in Erasmus, but in a similar program in Tokyo. Then we worked in Switzerland and Japan: this experience is somehow symptomatic. Everyone does it these days, or can do it. But in our case, this background determines everything we do now. We come from a school that insists on a very simple and focused education. When we left university, we didn’t think about anything other than what we were taught. Young students have to question themselves, have to ask themselves what they stand for.

B: You have a different way of presenting your projects and ideas, so much so that it has been described as “the naive charm of collage”. Why do you discard the typical forms of representation, such as renderings?
F M: When presenting a very specific idea for a project, you can’t just schematically reproduce the subject of the original task. A rendering, a collage, a photo of the model etc. are communication tools. They are not the object of the design, but only a way of looking at it. When choosing the method of presentation, you can choose precisely what you want to emphasize. For example, if you take a photo of the model, you emphasize a certain direction or perspective; with a collage you approach a layering; with a generic project without cross-references, the commercial rendering is perhaps best. We don’t reject renderings either. We’ve even entered a few competitions with them in recent months.
Ana Luisa Soares: We do both. It depends on the project and what you want to show, what your intentions are, what you want viewers to understand about the project. Sometimes a rendering is also necessary because the people who see it are not architects and would not understand a collage. Then a formal image is needed.
F M: But the most important aspect is that the project sets its own rules. Most of the time we work without thinking about communication. But the final image is created at the end. However, we also use collages as a process: at the beginning we make a simple collage and if we find out later that it says it all, then we don’t need to spend two or three days producing another picture. It’s already there! Of course, the juries here are difficult. They like the standard, the mainstream. Standards are good; if you don’t deliver them, sometimes you get thrown out. So when we have this final collage, we have a very clear idea of the project. We know what it stands for and what idea it is based on, so we can also decide on the best way to communicate the project. Basically, you could say that each project determines its own way of presentation: which image, which text do you use? Sometimes you write a very poetic text, sometimes you are very straightforward and concentrate on the construction, the calculations or the problem areas. The same applies to the layout: in a very standard layout, you might have very unusual images that stand on their own – and that can work well. But we don’t reject anything in terms of presentation. We do a bit of everything and each project sets its own rules.

B: Is there a certain utopian spirit in your projects?
F M: It depends on the project, but generally yes. In the beginning we were even more utopian than we are now. But, as you said, there is a naivety in our work. This is because we are young and are still fighting for a position with our projects. We know that we sometimes make decisions that will cost us our heads. These decisions mean that we will lose the competition, but we still know that the project needed this step to be perfect. It needs a direction to follow. The big question is: do we go commercial or do we not compromise? In the short term this doesn’t seem ideal, but in the long term we believe we will benefit from it.

B: What counts in competitions? What is important to win?
F M: The consensus.
A L S: It depends on the jury. The winner of one competition would not win with another jury. It’s always very subjective.
F M: Building is very expensive in Switzerland and generally speaking, it’s all about money in Switzerland. In most cases, the aim is to find a solution that produces the smallest building envelope: in other words, the smallest façade surfaces, the most efficient traffic routes, the best façade openings for utilizing sunlight, as it gets cold in winter. If you achieve all these things, you fulfill the basic criteria.
A L S: In Switzerland, you can’t have a competition with collages as a form of presentation either, because otherwise you don’t even reach the second round. They don’t understand that in Switzerland. Because it’s all about consensus. Imagine you’re a mayor and you announce a competition for a school. As mayor, this school becomes your project. So it doesn’t have to be the very best school, but the one that most people like. That’s how politics works… It’s not about building a monument or an icon, it’s about something quite peaceful. The aim is not to make a big “statement” at all, but to be careful and avoid any criticism.
F M: That’s why the pictures, layouts and representations are so important; because the public also get to see them. If you submit a collage, it can’t be presented to the public. You need a picture with trees, running children and balloons and everyone is happy.
A L S: Big websites only show the huge competitions. It’s all about the star system. The other 99 percent of competitions are about exactly that: finding something that makes the public happy. Nobody, apart from the architects, is really interested in pure architecture.

B: Is Switzerland really the El Dorado for architects today?
A L S: Switzerland has money. That’s why there’s work there. We need money to do architecture, because building is expensive. There are a lot of very good offices in Switzerland, the work is not just concentrated in one or two large offices.
F M: No, it’s spread all over the country. The average office is very good.
A L S: They all build. And they all put a lot of effort into each project.
F M: They are very professional. They have the best schools and universities and the best teachers. The average small Swiss office is incredible! And that’s because they can hire the best architects, they can develop good projects and spend enough time on them to gain experience. Then they get even better and hire even better architects… the whole thing has a snowball effect. For a foreign office like ours, there is a gradual increase: we have to understand the regulations, how the hare runs and what the clients want – in order to be able to play in the same league. This forces us to adopt a critical attitude.

B: How has your work been received in Portugal?
F M: I have to say one thing: it’s not without reason that we give lectures in Florence, Romania, Bratislava and Istanbul – but not a single one in Portugal. Not that we didn’t want to…
A L S: It has to do with our way of working and our world view, which are not so widespread in the usual day-to-day business in Portugal. Portuguese architects don’t take us seriously. They think we’re a trend. They say that we are fashionable, but that sooner or later we will be “out” again. And we tend to see the opposite, that many of them are outdated. They don’t want to arrive in the 21st century. None of our clients are from Portugal, which is telling… We mainly work abroad and the projects we do in Portugal are not the usual local projects, nor are they for local clients.
F M: It has to be said, even if it doesn’t seem like it from the outside, that Portugal is a very conservative country in many respects. We don’t completely break the mold either, but the way we present our work is a little different; this already fuels a certain skepticism towards us. But we don’t worry too much about that.

Translated from the English by Jorn Frezel