Experimental

Always ready

We are the global village kids.
As we grew up, the Internet grew up and, for the first time and step by step, we became digitally connected to the whole world. When we were about to turn 18, we experienced the low-cost boom. For less than 5 euros, you could fly, as we did, from Porto to Copenhagen, take a bus from Prague to Berlin or sleep in a hostel in the centre of London.

The digitally connected world we knew was then being transferred into the real world and, in a way that may never happen again, we could easily be somewhere else. There were no more physical limitations, or so it seemed.

This was our context; therefore, it cannot be dissociated from the practice we run today.

We felt at ease in any country and were eager to explore every culture. When we started our professional experience, going abroad was the natural path and we never went back, because you can never go back. Obviously, you can go back to some place, but you can’t unsee or dissociate from everything you’ve been through, nor can you slow down your desire to discover new things.

While going from place to place, collecting objects and keeping them with you quickly runs into logistical problems, and so you learn that the only things you can keep are the experiences, lessons and memories you’ve collected. This condition has forced us to think architecture in a reverse way.

We could no longer establish a practice in which ideas were infused only by local architecture, then given a global touch by importing some refined materials: marble from Italy, wood from Sweden, bricks from the Netherlands or exotic plants from Morocco.

For us, the process is quite the opposite, we are surprised by the beauty of the things we find, we want to use what we have just encountered, the local materials, resources and techniques. What we import are the ideas that we have been collecting around. Our resources are local and our ideas are global.

As kids from the global village we don’t dream about a new plot, we dream about exploring what we find in that new plot, as we always did. We are always ready.