NUNO MATEUS

It is with great pleasure that today we have the architect and professor Nuno Mateus as our guest. Be welcome. And we wanted to start by asking you to tell us a little about your academic background, what teachers you had, exercises you remember…

I attended the Faculty of Architecture but my course was a Fine Arts course, taken at the old school at the Convent of São Francisco. It was a striking space, very interesting in the long and wide corridors and not so interesting in the classrooms. For someone who left a boarding school, a space full of logic, it was a vacant place, where I felt particularly lost. I entered college in 79 and left in 84 and, at the time, college was a very un-stimulating place, which aroused little interest.

 

I didn’t go to architecture with the awareness that it was the course I wanted. We are pressured too early to make a choice, so I ended up making it. I made the choice that seemed closest to the things I liked to do, work with my hands, drawing. In fact, I had the feeling that everything interested me, that I could have taken any other course, and I also did not find during the years of course, a particularly attractive school stimulus. It was a destination, which I went to every day, an activity that I had included in a series of others that interested me. He came from a boarding school – full of rules and where the individual personality of people is shaped to the interests of a collective spirit. I was full of the desire to do other things, but I felt that it was my responsibility to take a course. I believe that the time that followed corresponded in a certain way to the search for my individuality, postponed by the school, and the various things that really interested me. Among these, the architecture course filled a partial space, not to say residual. What really interested me was the sport, which I practiced in high competition. I have a very eloquent and motivating story to share about my course.

The teacher who marked me the most was Daciano Costa, in the second year, in the discipline of Drawing. More than the specific content of the discipline, I was confronted with the ethics of their relationship with students: I tried to understand them in their relationship with themselves, in a kind of deconstruction that took place through drawing. Drawing became, from that time on, a more direct and more structuring tool of an attachment relationship with the course, which for me, until then, was very vague.

 

In that second year, I started working in the studio of the architect Costa Pecegueiro, I started to have work routines and that made me a student who, more or less interested in the chairs, fulfilled the work with a certain ease. I started to have a much more evident relationship with architecture. My relationship with the course became more profound and confident, as I gradually felt the mastery of the instruments of architecture. At that time I started to follow the works of the studio, which was very important to me because I really understood what I was learning and its application in real life, and how it affected others. And that was a very motivating experience.

 

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Why did you decide to look for work during the course?

Basically for economic reasons, but not only. I was born in a middle class family that had difficulties to put 4 brothers to study and take courses and I always valued my independence. For many years I worked in the grape harvest, in Portugal and later in France. The course opened up cultural horizons for which I had no economic capacity, to buy books and travel. For me, work was a very pragmatic way of being able to access other things, but obviously it has also become a learning asset.

 

There is a funny story that you told me that had to do with the first salary you received and with a special book…

Yes, the first book I bought was the Popular Architecture in Portugal, which I bought on installments. It cost me 20 contos at the time, which is now 100 euros. It was an immeasurable amount for me, and I paid it for a year. There was another special book, which I bought in Berlin, with the first one ordered by Daniel Liebskind. He paid me in cash at the end of the month and I went into a book store and Le Corbusier’s Complete Work was on sale, a block of fetish books by all architects, but the amount is always so great and discouraging. I went into the store with the money in my pocket and I couldn’t resist, I almost dropped it and left with the book, with the pad, under my arm … with immense difficulty, because that is so heavy! I was never the same …

 

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Did you bring any experience from that time when you were studying and working when you were invited to join the founding team of UAL Architecture?

After finishing my degree, I continued to work for two years in that same studio – Costa Pecegueiro – which had a lot of housing orders, but had a work model that over time became repetitive for me. At the time, I also taught at the Faculty of Architecture, as a trainee assistant in the fourth year, at the time with the architect Guedes de Amorim. And, after two years, it all seemed insufficient. If in economic terms my life was stabilized, I realized that it was not what I wanted. I traveled a lot (that was the essential application of my money), read, saw Architecture at another level for which I knew I had not been prepared and that I was interested in looking. I went to Columbia University, to do a Master’s and then I worked with Eisenman in New York and then with Libeskind in Berlin. Shortly after returning to Portugal, I was contacted by the group of architects who would later found the UAL Department of Architecture – João Luís Carrilho da Graça, Manuel Graça Dias and José Manuel Fernandes – who had an explicit desire to create a school of special architecture, very centered on the specific professional aspect of certain authors. At that time, my studio already had a little visibility, which resulted a lot from this route that I just talked about and from the experience of my brother José Mateus.

 

It was very interesting to see this project born, now 14 years old, and it is very interesting to see from a distance how the project was consolidated, to see that it still has the same type of dream, goals and ambitions and to see students and teachers equally committed, despite the context of fragilities in which we are immersed, and which continue, paradoxically, to insist on its permanence.

 

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As a teacher do you try to give what you did not have in the course?

At school I try, with the students, first of all, to understand them as people. I can’t see the architect as a person who does things. For me, the architect is an ethical mediator between physical reality and a reciprocity of behavior and uses. I try, as much as possible, to operate according to the demands of an eminently ethical logic because I am preparing them for an intervention in the future, not always certain. I don’t work in the past nor do I report to the models I had. I believe that these models will be incorporated, and they show, good or bad, in the way my relationship with them develops. Nor do I try to pass on fixed models, beyond the awareness of the unavoidable and comprehensive responsibility of our work. I try, one by one, to build something that belongs to both, that stimulates a real adhesion and evolution of the student. I don’t make chairs, I don’t pass tested and closed thoughts. I don’t see myself as a person who has a certain amount of information more than the student, but I have a focus, a certain way of seeing, that makes me learn and that I can transmit. I learn a lot to teach, because it forces me to think permanently about the way I think, bringing to the conscious plane what happens in the unconscious or intuitive, in order to be able to work operatively on the student’s evolution.

 

I see that other colleagues teach in very different ways and that encourages me a lot. It leaves me with doubts, makes me choose certain strategies, often in search of a complementarity that opens the spectrum of learning possibilities.

 

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Do you want to give an example of an exercise you have done? For example, what are you doing this year?

The fourth year, where I am currently teaching, is the first year of the 2nd cycle and precedes the end of the course – in which a large project is made with a written piece that bases it on a multifaceted, designed, written, thought and informed model various specialties, such as the professional model that follows. What we do in the 4th year is to anticipate this model and prepare students as best as possible, within the constraints, for a realistic and critical approach to the profession, always with a strong conceptual and cultural sense. We want the relationship between school and practice to come into the school, so that the school does not get too far from practice, but fosters, nevertheless, an attitude so that the profession is seen as a place to dream. Many of the teachers who teach at UAL, continue in their own offices to carry out extremely stimulating projects and this is a very demanding but necessary activity, as you can see.

 

At this time, in the 4th year, we joined the various chairs around a common design which is the City. As in the 5th year the project is usually done in the city of Lisbon or in the national territory, we use the 4th year to go on doing projects in several European cities and complement through them the understanding of our city and the learning of our role in the world. Last year we were in Barcelona, ​​this year we are in Amsterdam and the project takes place over the two semesters, linked in the scales of approach. We are aware that our work is globally territorial – we can work anywhere in the world. We have to develop learning strategies for places that we don’t necessarily know from the start. This year we are conducting this analysis of the city of Amsterdam using reinforced concrete models. Students manipulate and apprehend concrete in its multiple forms, in the design of molds, in its plastic capacity, in its need for reinforcement, in weight. The room is a laboratory, physical and chemical of matter, where experimentation takes place, which will then accompany them throughout their lives.

 

In the second semester, the exercise focuses on housing, which is probably the topic that we all think we know well and, for this very reason, is a topic that reveals a lot when we dedicate ourselves to it, with a deeper investigation of models that respond to the evolution of contemporary life systems. Each city is built by specific housing models. Knowing the house helps us to understand the city. And in Lisbon, in a house from the 1940s, everything was very compartmentalized and socially segregated. Today the kitchen occupies the central place of the fire of vernacular houses, but now processed in a new social model. Today, cooking is at the center of the household, the cuisine is gourmet, it is chic, and it is no longer a separate space where the invited people do not enter, quite the contrary, it is the meeting and sharing point. We try to understand what the house is today, with other hierarchies and models.

 

These exercises that you describe are very contemporary and are related to the current state of the profession.

These experiences about European cities have been very interesting, because in addition to the discovery they contain, they also dramatize, highlight and relativize the specificity of our territory. The idea that we are going to work for our city is an idea that today is not posed to anyone. Today we all know that it is cheaper to go to Barcelona than to Porto, for example. And it’s a shame because I like Porto a lot. Working in another city prepares students to develop a familiarity with what was once strange. We arrive in these cities, we always have some classes at a local architecture school and we try to get these teachers to interact with us throughout the year. Students are now full citizens of the world and will have different needs, at different times in different places, for which they must be operationally able. This at ease in the face of a wider world than the problems confined to our city or our country or our Europe, creates a very appealing sense of freedom, of great optimism and hope. We must not embark on this psychological crisis drama that involves our extremely castrating activity at this time, which I try to avoid taking to classes.

 

The idea of ​​the world being here has always been sought by you. When you finished the course, you took an interesting journey over several countries.

The courses that I did today, all the kids do, right? They do Erasmus, more than two thirds of my students are foreigners, they start looking for Autónoma to do the 2nd cycle. Today we are European citizens – citizens of the world. I believe that many of the borders will disappear, many of them have already disappeared informally. At many levels, we have no evidence that we are closed here and I will not be the one to contribute to this. My students already think like that and go very naturally to other countries, I was going with the greatest fear. The world has changed a lot in this respect.

 

How do you see the phenomenon, of having students from different countries, in parallel with the idea of ​​reinforcing an identity of Portuguese architecture? Is there a culture clash or do you not feel it in new generations?

I was never very interested in participating in the creation of a supposed identity of Portuguese architecture. Architecture exists and, in certain places, naturally takes on certain forms, for a number of reasons, and this is where I operate: on the reasons, on the foundations, in the readings of what may be the basis for architecture in a given place. And this phenomenon is universal between people and specific between places and, probably, programs. Even among colleagues, I see that some more quickly adhere to the idea of ​​formulating Portuguese architecture as a form of identity. It is a phenomenon that I refuse outright, I do not care about this idea of ​​architecture branding (it is a critical reading that I do, they probably do not see things that way). I am deeply fond of multiple forms of architecture, as long as I find the foundations, the relationships, the systems of cultural, geographical, material, economic, human relationship. Our territory is phenomenal from that point of view, it is more open than the minds of many architects. Sometimes I travel through huge countries where there is an incredible homogeneity, from north to south, of architectural typology, of construction systems, of landscape formulation, etc., and we, in our small country, have a panoply of reliefs, of agriculture, of architectures, typologies, which is incredible! I find it very easy, based on this multifaceted model that is our culture, and to deal with the specific. Perhaps for this reason, we Portuguese were so successful when we set out – whatever the path – and found forms of relationship, reasonably similar, in the four corners of the world.

 

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Does this open view of the world have much to do with the beginning of ARX Portugal?

ARX ​​Portugal, in the first place, it is worth mentioning the obvious, it has Portugal in its name. When I returned to Portugal, I came back deliberately and with conviction, because I thought, with my brother, that our biggest challenge was in Portugal, despite not wanting to be restricted to its territory as a local phenomenon. Even today, for any Portuguese, their biggest challenge will always be in Portugal, where everything is increasingly difficult. At the time – after having been out of the country for so long – I thought “I want to affirm Portugal every time I do anything”. And I think that, in Portugal, we are all ashamed of being repressed in being Portuguese, we are ashamed of our country, we do not put the flag on our doorstep like Americans (I don’t have it either). However, we have a country with extraordinary people thinking and doing things, which inspire me extraordinarily – from the start, architects, but also writers, surgeons, engineers, doctors, musicians, etc. And we celebrate, encourage and mediate very little merit and we mediate only the most absurd things (politicians, football commentators, soap operas, games …). It is not very mobilizing, in fact.

 

When we founded the firm, architects and architectures were always in the first name, there were masters. And I didn’t understand the masters well (I probably didn’t have the instruments for that yet), but I saw that architecture was made by a very wide range of people, and I didn’t want my activity to be named Nuno and Zé Mateus Arquitetos, because I always saw the architect at the center of a network of knowledge that converged on a certain problem, in a certain place. ARX ​​had a play on words: Architecture, Texture and Text. Texture in that sense of network and Text in the sense in which it was written and that one could read – something that could convey information was built. Not necessarily an aesthetic artifact, but an artifact that, being able to be encoded and decoded, becomes a vehicle for knowledge and interaction.

At the moment we are looking for work outside the country and we continue to have the name of Portugal glued to the ARX, we often see that our country is perceived – outside – as a cluster of thought in our professional area, it is seen as a place of architectural excellence . The fact that the name of Portugal has been adopted even has a certain charm, not to mention added value. In short, it was a depersonalized claim by the author and the affirmation of the country as a perfectly viable place and, at least at the time, lacking our investment in its critical mass, our individual participation and our responsibility to make the country more plural, more livable…

 

Do you want to name some people who are references for you?

On a daily basis at school, all teachers who are or have been connected to UAL are people who stimulate me immensely and who, by the way they teach and produce architecture, force me daily to do better than I did yesterday, which is not exactly comfortable, but I see it as a privilege!

 

I can’t isolate references, I have so many. I have no doctrines. I can appreciate works with very different characteristics, for different reasons. I cannot share the idea of ​​many colleagues, whom I cherish and admire, that there is only the work of a certain architect or done with certain materials, certain shapes or angles, etc … this does not interest me at all.

 

I am immensely satisfied with a very wide range of works. And it is not for lack of criteria, I just do not have a costume. You could wear jackets with many different fabrics, colors, lining, cuts, fastenings and buttons …, but you would still use a criterion in your choice. As in a work.

 

And ateliers of younger architects?

Our profession is slow. I have been teaching classes for twelve years and I know the works of some students who already have some works well done – the case of Miguel Marcelino, and who has had some media coverage.I am also coming across Andreia Salavessa, who was a first-time student from UAL, and who immediately won the Secil Universidades Award, which was a joy for us all, students and teachers. One of the greatest virtues of our school is this close proximity between the faculty and students. I see UAL as a privilege as a teaching and learning context. Not many people are accommodated there. There is only a permanent energy that converges specifically in that space and that I feel very clear as a teacher. It is obvious to outsiders.

 

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Did you talk about atelierMOB (Andreia Salavessa’s studio) and what do you think about, nowadays, the work of younger studios is no longer the type of work that traditionally an architect was supposed to do, crossing many more areas and disciplines?

An architect is a multifaceted being, has an education that is not completely humanistic or scientific, combining these two great areas of knowledge, which are manifested through the artistic component. This is an extremely complex training model, which in a way refers to the Renaissance Man. Due to natural limitations, we are a kind of specialists of different superficialities, and our performance adapts to the context of the problems that pose us, the client, the work… It is certain that for more than two decades, due to our accession to the EU, it appeared a certain type of public works, museums, libraries, schools … In the recent past – and I think the Triennale, in this last edition (2013) also mediated this way a lot – we have talked a lot, and maybe at a good time, about social dimension of architecture, which however I think has never been absent from the most interesting architects’ work strategies. Not only in architecture, but in a series of other fields, much as a result of the violence of the economic readjustment that we are going through, these issues are frequently appearing and, fortunately, the field of architecture is no exception.

Doctors always have patients and architects too, because the buildings continue to get sick and have to be repaired. The existing building is an essential asset and will always require intelligent interventions, with more knowledge, with increased durability and greater incorporation of value. The educated architect can read, in relation to the built heritage, much more dimensions than the builders or a developer, no matter how cultured. You can see further, I have no doubt, because you have other instruments. I have friends who are extraordinarily brilliant in the field of music, or painting, influential worldwide and who, in the field of their specific culture, have a reference knowledge, but then move on to the next field (architecture) and look like other people, who did not open the same books and we found that knowledge is much more watertight after all! I venture to say that the architect crosses more knowledge. We are more educated to know about the limitation of our own knowledge and the need to have to complement that knowledge in other disciplines, with other people. And an architect, every time he puts a project in a Chamber, has to put in about fifteen more projects and gets used to it, routinely. Get used to that your head alone does not reach.

 

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Assuming this transversality, where architecture processes knowledge and then returns it transformed into a synthesis that is more than individualized knowledge, it is interesting to think that, from the point of view of the construction of knowledge about architecture itself, there is a certain crossroads…

Yes, there is a certain deficit of self-reflection today. It seems to me that we are so turned to this complementarity of knowledge that we forget to reflect on our own knowledge. As an architect, I am an avid visitor to the works of other colleagues that I appreciate. And luckily there are many. And it is clear, through these works, that there is an extraordinary accumulated knowledge in Portugal – which is inscribed on the buildings. But it is not registered in other means of consultation, it is not passed on to other forms of knowledge, which are those that we are used to consult when we are learning – it is not written. Today, teachers are all pressured to do doctorates, so that schools have measurable ratios in Bologna. This fact has accentuated the divide between the academic and the professional milieu, separating them from each other. Architects are forced to leave architecture schools, which are filled with teachers of studied subjects, outside the field of the project.

 

When faced with the pressure of the thesis, I opted to develop an investigation about my own process of constructing paths of thought to arrive at the buildings I built at ARX. I decided to close the circle between practice and research. I used the model, which is a research instrument that I privilege at UAL, and which is known in the academic world, for its particular methodological connection to the physical object, that is, the model as a place of thought and vehicle of reasoning itself. I started by doing the survey, the repair, enumerating them, and then going on to analyze what types of models I made. Because it’s one thing to be in the studio, under pressure, doing projects and projects, another is to take the models, see that there are about three thousand, look at the landscape and dissect all that work and write this reflection down so that it can be shared .

 

The title of the thesis that was made is “Taxonomy and operativeness of architectural thought” and concerns two issues: Taxonomy has to do with this analytical look at the models and group them in typologies – models of structures, of context, of detail, diagrams, etc; Operativeness in the sense of perceiving which model follows the previous one and perceiving how they feed themselves and how reasoning evolves through the succession of choices.

 

The second part of the title is “Drawing on a model” and is based on the idea that the drawing is not opposed to the model but that the model is itself a drawing. A drawing, in the sense that Siza speaks of a “desire for intelligence”. It is a three-dimensional drawing, it is not the model as representation, it is the model as a form, space and place of organization. It is also an object, and this is no less important in the thesis – the question of being three-dimensional, tactile, subject to gravity and of materials aggregated in specific ways – has a series of questions related to making architecture, with other materials, with other scales but always subject to gravity, three-dimensionality, habitability, being exposed to light.

 

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The idea of ​​doing a PhD in this way is also a statement that research in architecture is more than research in the history of architecture or urbanism or research for a given project. Are there more paths?

There hasn’t been, but I believe that the paradigm shift that we are seeing in architecture, accompanied by the demographic explosion of schools of architecture, will necessarily produce many other models that I hope will feed a greater critical mass, less corporate and defensive, more open and with less prejudice. I have already had the opportunity to participate in international academic research seminars in architecture where I found that the research world to which a good part of the actors, distinguished academics, were dedicated to subjects that seemed to me extraordinarily interesting but deviated from what is the world of architecture built, inhabited by people, part of the cities and subject to the weather and inscribed in the history of architecture to which, modestly I try to dedicate myself with commitment. It was the stimulus that I lacked …

 

What is your vision for the future of ARX? And for architecture in general?

Clearly, the international dimension is today something that we have to dedicate ourselves professionally, with the same methodical rigor with which I dedicated myself until recently to a PhD. We are already used to getting to a place where the British and Americans are usually installed, with the diplomacy, economy and defense machine working together so that companies will all come back to operate. As far as our diplomatic operating machine is concerned, we arrive anywhere and come across institutions working on the status quo, very disconnected from the whole economic and social machine in which they operate. When the companies there ask for connections to these means, the support is of a tremendous weakness, which leaves each one to themselves …

 

We have everything to build. We, Portuguese architects, when we are working, we immediately have the burden of the country we came from: we are always seen as coming from a country with little rigor, that spends what it does not have, that it has to borrow, that does not organize itself … And our activity is to deal with projects that involve very significant amounts of money, works of great organizational scope that have to be delivered on time, within budget, in everything contrary to the perception of the country and this naturally creates added difficulties. And that is why when architects such as João Luis Carrilho da Graça, Manuel and Francisco Aires Mateus or Gonçalo Byrne, start to have work outside, they have it with tremendous difficulty! If they were Swiss or English or German they had infinitely larger quantities. But a lot of people are starting to operate internationally, largely because of the circumstances in which we are involved at home. Work at home, at the moment, is artificially compressed. There will come a time when people get tired of this compression and money will start circulating again and there will necessarily be more work – it will take time, but there will always be. But it is good to realize that the movement inside and outside has to be natural, it has been natural for some time within the architecture schools that fully assimilated the Erasmus phenomenon, and most of the studios have work inside and outside, to perhaps with greater expression in the PALOP countries, but the time will surely come that it will become natural in other territories.

 

In 74 we stopped having colonies – we had the whole country turned outwards where much of our best architecture was done and, from then on, we closed ourselves in here, under a constant financial flow from Europe that allowed us to be here for a few decades. gradually doing a lot of high quality architecture as well. All of a sudden, they closed us all and we are all making the effort that will naturally change the paradigm! It is not pain-free, but clearly, for me, this will necessarily have a more attractive future.