Architecture as an Art of Permanence

摘要

Manuel Aires Mateus (MAM): I shall answer that by first sharing with you our background. We are both from Lisbon and we both did our studies there. At the beginning, I was working in Goncalo Byrne's office, and before long my brother joined me. We had our own little studio inside that office, and as our projects started to increase, we grew too big and decided to have an independent office. We eventually decided to split our office into two smaller offices as it became difficult for us to manage. Doing so helps us to have a much more efficient way of handling projects, as we reduce other stresses and allow ourselves to focus solely on our investigations into architecture. In terms of teaching, I officially started teaching in 2001 together with my brother at the Mendrisio Architecture Academy. Because we always work and teach together, we are able to communicate and discuss our project ideas and findings regularly. We work according to the same principle, which is that the problem of a project is concentrated on the question. We start each project by reflecting on the situation and work on finding the question based on our reflection. Then, we extract from the question the problem that we are interested in and start investigating the problem. It is the problem that defines each project. From there, we decide who or which office is to develop the project and from time to time check the progress. Depending on the size and complexity of the project, there are some projects we will decide to develop further together. For example, for exhibitions like the Chicago Biennial and Venice Biennale, we had the opportunity to investigate a wide range of situations and design together. We are always interested in finding new problems and discussing new possibilities.