INÊS LOBO

It is with great pleasure that we invite the architect and teacher Inês Lobo as a guest. Welcome! We wanted to start by asking you to tell us a little about your academic background, some outstanding teachers, some exercises that were important and that you still remember today.

I joined Escola do Porto and that starts off being the most remarkable thing in my academic career. Unfortunately, I had to leave after a year, for family reasons. But I was lucky to get a group of teachers that I am still friends with. Teachers like Sérgio Fernandez (who was the coordinator of the first year) and Professor Henrique Carvalho (who unfortunately has passed away). And there was History with Professor Fernando Távora.

The course was similar to the course at the Autonomous University today. It was a very small course. We were about seventy students in the first year and we had classes inside the same room, in a very beautiful pavilion. And it was very intense, with a very direct relationship with the teachers, who were tireless. It was a very interesting experience. Most of the students were from Oporto and this generated a great complicity, we were all away from home, which greatly increased the intensity of how that year was lived. Then, another interesting thing is that most of my colleagues today are people that we all recognize: Nuno Grande, João Pedro Serôdio, Cristina Guedes, Francisco Vieira de Campos, Pedro Cortesão…

When I came to Lisbon it was a terrible shock, because I arrived and things were not the same way. It was a very different school and it was difficult for me. But it had to be and I continued there. And I had teachers that I remember very well … a very important figure was Daciano Costa, Desenho – with whom I had a difficult, but quite intense relationship. It was only Project with Professor Silva Dias, in the fourth year, that I returned to be enthusiastic about college. Then, with a lot of luck, I caught Carrilho da Graça last year, which was worth the whole school. The architect Carrilho da Graça “pricked us” a lot, the classes were very tough, he was always putting us in check. But it went very well, it was very interesting. And it was very important because afterwards I ended up going to work with him, so it was the transition to the professional world from school.

 

Was the choice of architecture as a course, much thought or was it more intuitive?

I have no architects in the family. My father was always a man very connected to the universe of the arts. I worked in the Gulbenkian libraries and is a very learned man, he was perhaps my main teacher throughout my life, both in this universe of architecture, as in many others. And it still is! He tells me that when I was little, he said: “When I grow up I want to build houses!” I don’t remember any of that, nor did I live thinking about it. But I also don’t remember living thinking about doing anything else. When it came time to choose, I chose only Architecture in Porto and Lisbon. I never gave the chance to go for something else. But that doesn’t mean I don’t see myself doing a thousand and one things with the same charm and thinking that they could be as interesting forms of life as architecture.

 

Were there any academic ideas and experiences that you brought to the discussions at the beginning of the UAL course?

The creation of the UAL course was very interesting. When I finished the course, there were four courses in architecture, the course in Porto, in Lisbon, the Lusíada was starting and the Árvore, in Porto. And architecture courses quickly started to appear everywhere. I started teaching at Lusíada, right in the year that I finished the course. And when the Autónoma course was formed, there was something fundamental that was not wanting to take a course like all the other private universities that had appeared in the meantime. And join a group of architects from Lisbon who had not had an academic experience as interesting as the architects who had attended the school in Porto, which, whether we like it or not, was a school.

When you think about the Autónoma course, you don’t think about doing what other private universities were doing, which was above all taking courses with a lot of people to earn money. We try to invent from scratch a course that will seek people everywhere and appear as a School of Architecture. In this group were people with diverse experiences, but with a very clear idea of ​​what a school should not be. And that was extremely important.

 

 

And over the past 14 years, where do you think the UAL course is at?

It is a very difficult question… we did not know what the world and the world of architecture would be in the years that followed the formation of the course and I think that we are not going through a very interesting moment, neither in the teaching of architecture, nor in architecture itself, not even in the life of the architect… and I think that universities are suffering from this problem.

The first problem with which I think UAL is struggling and with which it is continuing to struggle has to do with the number of students. And it is not because few students enter, it is because there is no possibility for students to choose and when I say “choose”, it is not that one should select. The important thing was to show up a lot of people, so that the “good” of those people who appeared would then become. And when I say the “good ones” are the ones who want to stay, the ones who want to stay and take the course.

In addition to this problem, another problem is that the courses are disappearing and so are the students. There are fewer students joining Architecture and there are also more public schools, I think that in the last fourteen years a series of other public schools have appeared, which are always before private schools – for various reasons but above all for economic reasons. So, however much you want, a private university of architecture in Portugal, at this moment, does not have an easy life, however good it is, as long as there are as many public ones as there are.

With Bologna, it was thought that these things could be reversed a little, opening up free competition in the latter, students would move more between private or public, but that is not what is happening. We have not yet reached that point because it is not yet paid in public as in a private one.

It is also clear that Autónoma has evolved a lot! When he started he was very close to that central nucleus – the architect Manuel Graça Dias, the architect João Luís Carrilho da Graça and the architect José Manuel Fernandes – who were very important figures in the early years of Autónoma – and joined younger people, older people and from different disciplinary areas as well, to discuss it. It has always been one of the great goals of Autónoma to say that an architecture course cannot be done only by architects. And it has always been tried that the other disciplinary areas have a certain weight. Then, and I think that after these fourteen years, with a critical eye, we still have a course in which the Project is the central theme and which occupies, perhaps, excessive space in relation to other disciplines. Another thing that is important is that Autónoma has always maintained that we were there to train project architects. As it is a small school, I think that is what we always wanted to do and it works. Anyway, if we look at the number of architects we are training today, I think that the teaching of architecture cannot continue to imagine that we are all going to be designer architects, because we are not. I think that the training of architects has to reinvent themselves a little and has to go through other things. It does not mean that Autónoma does it, because it has a profile to train these architects designers, but we have to think a little about what should be the training of young architects at this time.

 

Your year in Porto was very remarkable, and you mentioned several names that are quite well known in the world of architecture in Portugal – do you think it was a case in point? Was it a spirit of generation? Did it have to do with architecture at that time?

I don’t really believe in chance! I think things happen because something was built to make them happen. What happened at Escola do Porto, at that time, is that the course was very well structured, very well done. I think we were the lucky ones to have been students at that time at Escola do Porto. I was now remembering that Ricardo Bak Gordon was also there the following year and, therefore, more than my year, it is that moment. It may also have happened that a group of people who were more interested in the subject came together and now have the feeling that many people were formed at the same time that many people survived. If I want to remember my colleagues at the Lisbon school at that time, those who survived are much less.

Do I think it can happen today? I don’t know if it can and if it happens the same way. There is one thing that I still think that Autónoma has achieved; it has managed to get many students to work together, to propose to do things … not every year it happens, because it also has to do with the group of students and how the class works, but it happens often. As the course is very intense during these five years, people do not want to lose the good things that this intensity produces, this relationship between people and this desire to work together. They have a tendency to prolong this over time and I think it is extremely important for the professional life to follow.

 

What principles do you have in the discipline you teach – Project, in the fifth year – and what changes have there been over these fourteen years?

As I said a little while ago, I was teaching at Lusíada and started teaching the 2nd year, which is a year that I particularly like, because the students are not yet “deformed” and it is no longer the 1st year, in which the collision on arrival at college, which is more difficult. There, they are calmer, there was a first selection made and they are still available for everything that may happen.

I remember that, when he was in the fifth year, João Luis had been a teacher, in the year before mine, in the first year. So he decided to do something highly subversive, which was to do the same exercise he had done in the 1st year, but now in the 5th year and go and get the 1st year students to discuss the work with us. And the works of the 1st year were much more interesting than ours. It was the first encounter with João Luis, with him explaining to us: “You have been here for five years but what you have learned is of little interest! Let’s go back! ”. It was to try to clear the friction accumulated over the previous four years. But it was a very funny experience.

I think the first few years are very interesting years. It is evident that the last few years give possibilities to do other things, which are not possible to do in the 1st year. I am a little restless about what to do during classes and I think that it never works and is never okay and I always go there thinking about what, and how I will teach and do the exercises.

 

 

Should students’ exercises or not be adapted to the eventual reality, or to the potential existing market, or, on the other hand, should they be completely free exercises where students have the last opportunity to do what they dream of doing?

Regarding what the possibilities of an architect are today, nobody imagined twenty years ago that what we were going to have now was this. What is more terrible, but at the same time very fascinating, of what we are going through is thinking that we don’t even know what this is. The architect has to position himself as a kind of researcher, at this moment, looking at the world – the questions to think are more than many -, it is an endless work, at all possible scales of the work of an architect. In work groups much more than as an individual, in think tanks.

What should this be in the final year of college? I have a somewhat selfish attitude towards what is college, because I think I am always doing what I am interested in doing. I can’t even do anything else. And what I have been trying to do in the last year of college, especially since four / five years ago, is to try to put students before a problem that is not yet clearly stated and I also do not know how to enunciate. For example, this year the theme I launched was Monsanto. Monsanto is something that does not work in the city of Lisbon at the moment. It has accessibility problems, because it is cut at all limits. It is a great structure that was invented, in a bit of a romantic way, by Keil do Amaral to be a park where you can drive around, at a time when there were even a few cars… today it is not part of the habits of people who live this city. It is a space of a gigantic dimension, completely abandoned. And what I try to do with the students is to say: “There is this problem! Let’s see how this can be resolved. ” It is evident that it is a giant problem, which cannot be solved, either by me or by them, in six months of classes. Therefore, the idea is not to solve the problem, it is to spell out possible strategies and experiment, on a small scale, with a possible resolution of part of that strategy. And what interests me is the construction of this whole reasoning, which occupies more than 50% of the time, until they finally find a way to act, with which they are very excited, and also find possibilities to build in that territory. It is a difficult exercise, which depends a lot on the group that is working. There are times when it works extremely well and there are times when it is a disaster!

 

A teacher’s strategy grows with himself. What you do now was not what you did 15 years ago and nowadays your “I” is more diverse and it transports itself to what your students do. Does this diversity and experience acquired over time help to bridge the generational difference?

What unites me with my students is not the Project chair, it is the problems we have to address today, which are the same – regardless of whether we are 20, 40, 60 or 80. We are all responding to the same thing. Therefore, unite the time when this is happening. We are all here to reflect simultaneously on the job possibilities we have now. I had a new experience recently, which was to be the curator of the Venice Biennale. I had to put together a job in two / three months and, maybe, without thinking about it, I ended up doing an exercise like I do at the university – I only realized it after it was done. Once again, I went to pick up a territory, which was the city of Lisbon, and instead of doing it with the students, I did it with the architects and said: “Let’s go and reflect on a series of themes about this city!” .

 

The architect Nuno Portas, on a guided tour of his exhibition at the CCB, said that at the time of his study there were fewer studies and fewer events, but that the ones that had been published and everyone knew them, and had continuity and impact. And now much more is produced and everything disappears. It is the counterpoint to this excess of information…

It is produced very quickly and then there is no continuity. Do not go deeper. I really enjoyed having a study center just about Lisbon and I didn’t mind being always doing this, because it doesn’t end. And the most important thing is that every time you want to do a job on Lisbon, you have to start from scratch. You have to go looking for plants, you never find anything … in any period of history, things are not well documented, organized. The information is even there, but it takes a lot of work to find it, a lot of time is wasted.

 

We are talking about the students and their final course work and that they will soon leave. Where do you go?

Nowadays it is for foreigners! But I think that the job possibilities still exist. I think it is a tremendous mistake to start everyone emigrating. Despite knowing, too, that it is very difficult, at the moment, to find work in Portugal.

I think there is a lot to do, but these are not immediate things. In these moments, when little is built, it is the ideal time to think a lot. There are few things to think about, there is no money to build the way it was built twenty years ago. We were one of the most backward countries in Europe with regard to basic needs and, therefore, we took up the construction of everything that is the School Park we have, first for Higher Education and also for Basic Education. We took the construction of Museums, Hospitals. All the basic necessities that Portugal did not have, unlike the rest of Europe. This is over. But in the rest of Europe, it has ended much longer and that is not why it stopped being built. What I think, at this moment, is that a lot has been built, a lot of housing has also been built, perhaps unnecessarily. Nowadays, we have a much larger housing park than we need, if we talk about Lisbon specifically. But Lisbon still doesn’t work well. It is one of the most beautiful cities we can find around the world – I already know enough – it is a fabulous city, where you live quite well, contrary to what you might imagine. It is a city where it is easy to live, with lots of positive things, but it is necessary to continue to think about how it can work well. And this has to do with the issues of proximity, with the issues of mobility. Issues that have been resolved, not in a fixed way, but in a dispersed way and, therefore, today, have immense problems. Which are possible to solve with small interventions, subtracting instead of building. Doing a series of operations that are not just about construction, they are, for example, about reflecting on programs – how programs are distributed throughout the city, how the city is organized and structured, etc. And, for this, architects are fundamental, there is no doubt. So I think we have to find workspaces again that are available for architects to use what they know how to do.

And there is something very important that has to do with the separation of knowledge. I think the profession of the architect has to reinvent itself again because in the last few years, in which we have been busy building, knowledge has become more and more separated… and in our area it makes no sense, we are not a specialist in nothing, we are the exact opposite – we are a non-specialist. We have a quality that, perhaps, many people no longer have because they have become specialists! Which is the ability to synthesize and to take all of this knowledge and build something with it. That is our profession! And what is it that is built? There can be many things – it can be a building or a space in the city, it can be the definition of a program of uses of any space, it can be thousands of things. We have to be aware of this capacity that we have and be more involved in several areas, namely in another area that I think is very important, which is Politics. Architects need to be able to, too, be present in political decisions, because these decisions collide, every day, with what is the space where we live. And architects have fled a lot, in recent years, from these activities, something that, in the time of Portas, once again, they did not escape. So, there was a time when people dedicated themselves to building, because there was a lot to build too – this does not endorse either for or against anyone, it was a context. But people have dedicated themselves to this and have clearly lost space in professional areas where architects are important. Something that did not happen, for example, with engineers, because they are much more and have more strength as a professional class, they are always trying to find ways to position themselves in society and have an important and active role in all areas that concern them . Architects have lost that ability and perhaps lost some importance as well. I look at architects like Nuno Portas, Álvaro Siza, Fernando Távora, Manuel Tainha, they are personalities that the crowds stop to listen to! They are not just talking about architecture, they are talking about the world! And what is your relationship with the world? And trying to be interventional in the world that is theirs!

 

Maybe it makes sense to try to find new ideals to fight for, doesn’t it?     

Does. Architecture also faces a giant problem, which is the loss of importance of human beings. And we work for the human being. We build for people. If people are no longer important, architecture ceases to exist. And this is perhaps the biggest crisis that we have right now. We must continue to fight for the world to exist for all the Men who inhabit it.

 

In the projects you have at the moment, do you already see some changes, is there hope?

I think there are a lot of changes. We have experiences, coming from South America, that we look at with great enthusiasm. But neither can we say that the great figures of architecture, media and important in the world of communication, do not play their role and do not help the architecture to continue to be discussed and heard. So, let us not radicalize the positions!

There is one thing that people, when they leave courses today, have to do: they have to find a place to work. They have to be open so that the space they come across is quite different from what they imagined; but, they have to be able to use their training to do a job that can go from inspecting a work, working in a city hall and discussing very important problems, in politics, in a museum, in your atelier, wherever… you must have the capacity to use the knowledge they have acquired and which they will still acquire in pursuit of the same objective, which is that we continue to reflect, build and use the spaces of the city that we have in the best way. As long as this is the position, I think anything is possible. There are no better jobs and worse jobs. Architecture also has this very interesting aspect, which is to act in thousands of contexts, not only in one. Being an architect is a very complex activity and can be very diverse. Even in areas where we are not the main figure! It is another thing that architects have little capacity to do. I imagine that the architect may be working with a team that develops an airplane, where he is not the fundamental person, or that he may be working on a team that is reflecting on a community that moves and starts to inhabit any country. and that the main figures are an anthropologist or some other profession … we have little capacity to work that way. Which is a pity. We always have a certain tendency, of formation, to lead! What will stop happening …

 

 

In this opening of the discipline that must exist, and that should have always existed, how do you see the importance of research and the relationship that it can have with practice?

I think architecture is a very new discipline in this area. If we go to areas like Biology, research is the engine of the discipline. In architecture, the professional practice of architects was more the engine than the investigation. Research has always been a parallel thing, and often the people who are in practice are not the people who investigate. I think that should also change. I try that what I do is also research. I had the opportunity to do a series of works, which were very difficult to do because I was not in the research area – and I had to “twist” the studio in reverse to respond to other types of work. Lately, I have been developing a work for the CML on the Santana hill. Which is an investigative work – it is looking at that piece of city, where there are already a series of architects working, and reflecting on what it may be, with the intervention of all those architects, what are the other hypotheses you have and why you should change. To do this, I had to go back I don’t know how many years back and do an investigation on that piece of territory over time, I had to consider programs and do a job that, in the end, is a book with four hundred pages of project – that, if we want to look at it in a conservative way, there is very little design. But that is a great project! So the investigation that interests me is this. As you can imagine, it has crossed my mind many times – and it is a question that often arises to the architects of my generation – whether I am going to do a PhD or not. And, really, I haven’t had time to do any PhD, and, as the practice in the studio is intense, it sets aside this question of research. I don’t feel the need to go on to do my PhD because I spend my days studying!

When more research took place, we went back to the Nuno Portas generation again, people did not have a doctorate. People did things and recorded things. It was not a topic in practice, or in the professional life of an architect, nor in the life of an architect as a teacher. Nowadays it is more than proven that it is important, or that it is necessary – to continue the teaching career – to go through stages other than just the Bachelor’s Degree or, at this moment, the Master’s Degree. You have to keep doing that route. Me, if I don’t need to do it … I’ll run away from him seven feet away! But I’m taking a risk, of course. I don’t have a place in any public university, I don’t have a doctorate and I’m not willing to rush to do it. I also think that this, unfortunately, always has to do with economic phenomena – which is making money from this and that and this thing about PhDs, of course it has to do with an economic issue… there are times when everything is behind these things then calm down again. I think time will tell how things are going to go in reality. Now that research is a crucial activity for the development of disciplines, I think so and I think that there is a huge area in which architects should dedicate themselves more, but dedicate themselves by crossing with practice, which is what we do in the other areas – at least in the areas that fascinate me the most, which are the areas of science where the application of research is direct and permanent. Research is at the service of practice. It can only be so.

 

In the universe of our university, you are the only woman with an activity that remains predominantly male. In fact, of all the names you mentioned, except for a mistake, you only said one woman too, didn’t you? You think it makes a difference, or work is work…

The problem of women clearly exists, and continues to exist. The other day, I received a distinction from the Secretary of State for Culture, and the director general of the arts said something with which I fully agree that it was: “What was good was that we didn’t have to be giving these distinctions…” Because is it possible to distinguish people by sex? They should not be distinguished. In the world of work they should be distinguished for what they do.

Why is that not happening and far from happening? For a variety of reasons. Many have to do with cultural and educational issues, which have been rooted in our society for centuries, as girls being educated differently from boys, we tend to educate our children with what we bring from behind. This is something that we see quickly, and that is chilling, but it is true.

I was lucky not to be that polite! I was fortunate to have a father and mother who did not educate me as a girl or as a boy. I owe my parents the fact that I have always looked at the world not because of my feminine condition but as a person. Then there are things that continue to be evident in our society or in our feminine nature: women have children, men do not. Despite being parents. But this issue of motherhood is a huge difference at a certain point in a woman’s life. And there are things where they cannot be replaced. It is women who breastfeed, not men. There is a first moment in the children’s lives in which the woman has a very important role. And does this affect your professional activity? Condition. And is society prepared for this? No, it’s not. I managed to manage both because I have a studio that is mine and that has a daycare center. We took the children all inside the studio – me and the women who work there and the men too. But this is something completely counter-intuitive and that involves a huge effort and that, many times, may not even be the best situation, I have this possibility, but I am not an example. It remains difficult, but I also think that, personally, I did not want to be replaced, it is society that has to adapt a little more to that. And the world of work is made for you to work from eight to eight and to have permanent availability and to be permanently available on your mobile phone and that is not compatible with wanting to be a father and mother… it is a problem that will not be solved now, nor no one is trying to solve it.

 

 

How was your journey to set up your own studio and what new principles / programs did you add to the architecture studio?

I never had the idea of ​​setting up a studio alone. When I left João Luís, it was for several reasons. Issues that even had to do with personal issues and that forced me to have to find another way to make money, at a specific time. And I set up the studio with Pedro Domingos. Then, we ended up separating, for personal reasons and not for reasons of work incompatibility, and at that time I started to set up a studio again but I have a partner, who is not an architect, and who is a crucial piece in my studio. Without him, that studio didn’t exist because he is a person who likes to have a company, and I don’t have a great vocation for that. This combination is a wonderful thing. But, quite honestly, I never had the urge to “now I’m going to make a studio!”; in fact, when I set up this studio, the question of the name was raised (and this will now stick to the women’s question) and I said “We can put a name…” and everyone said “No, no! The studio will be called Inês Lobo Arquitectos because being a girl gives a lot of output! ”. In a way, it was an opportunistic view of the problem!

 

If you could choose, without constraint, what you would do next year, what would you choose?

There are two things that, for me, with the studio I have and what I have to do at the moment, are extremely important: on the one hand, to continue to be able to build – which is something that, for an architect who is used to doing it for not-know-how many years, it costs to imagine that it will no longer have that possibility. On the other hand, what I liked, too, was to continue these works that I have developed in the city of Lisbon. What is interesting when doing research work is that it does not end and, therefore, being able to continue advancing in what I have done so far, for me, was perhaps the most important.

 

What did I really like? I would like to continue to maintain the studio I own! That it’s not just me, it’s a structure with several people, for many years. To continue to make sure that this group of people can work, can have their lives, is the most important thing. We have succeeded, until now – although we are going through a bad time … the studio has reduced a lot. But despite that, I am currently doing the most interesting jobs ever! I have jobs in hand that I didn’t think was possible. They don’t give much money, they forced us to reduce the studio, but the proposals are perhaps the most exciting I’ve ever had, since I started working. I have this job at Colina de Santana, I’m doing a mosque at Almirantes Reis, they are unique jobs and they are very rewarding. If this went on, it was no longer bad!