SPACE January 2026 (No. 698)
144 (house of three structures)
DIALOGUE Filipe Magalhães, Ana Luisa Soares, Ahmed Belkhodja, Lera Samovich fala Co-Principals × Suh Jaewon Principal, aoa architects
A ‘Difficult Whole’
Suh Jaewon (Suh): In 2023, I wrote an essay for the a+u fala feature, titled ‘Art of Love’, and in it I mentioned the difficulties you faced practicing as young architects in Portugal. You opened your office in 2013, Filipe Magalhães and Ana Luisa Soares at the age of 25. Ahmed Belkhodja and Lera Samovich joined the practice right after. As a young atelier, I think you went through a very hard time pursuing your practice because of the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis. During that period, I remember several of your projects; most of them were small housing projects. In that article, I wanted to point out a certain sadness in the national circumstances and situation of your practice. Many architects see fala as very playful, colourful, joyful, with a kind of naive attitude, but I also see during those early years a sense of frustration in your attitude.
fala: Before the economic crisis, schools taught us that we were going to design museums, public buildings, and large-scale works of architecture. After graduation, however, Europe moved in the opposite direction. Most companies were reducing staff and construction was slowing down. We were frustrated, because we were young and had been led to believe that we were going to change the world. However, in reality, we were working on very small and nearly irrelevant projects. Since the establishment of the atelier, over a decade ago, we have designed mostly small projects. Some architects design beautiful masterpieces related to museums, schools, and so on, but most do not have a chance to design what has ‘traditionally been regarded as truly relevant’—what is considered ‘real’ architecture. So, some architects design very beautiful small projects, and that’s what we attempt to do.
Three years ago, we won three public housing competitions in Portugal, all of them completely out of scale to our previous projects. Each of them alone is bigger than everything we had ever done, multiplied by ten. They are really at the scale of the city. And what we learned is that everything we had done before – those small renovations and transformations – informed the way we designed these public housing projects. An those, in parallel, taught us a lot about how to return to the ‘normal’ projects. So, it’s like...
