Look at Portuguese studio Fala Atelier's work and it is hard to believe its three founding directors' claim that 48 out of 50 of their clients are not interested in architecture and most don't even know the practice's name. The firm's mostly residential work is so colourful, graphical and different to most architecture in the public domain it seems implausible their clients aren't commissioning them specifically. 'That,' says co-founder Filipe Magalhaes, 'is the main martial art we have to deal with... Clients are not hiring a designer, they are hiring a lawyer to oversee the project.' The construction industry is different in Portugal to the UK. To build, drawings must be signed off by an architect. 'The vast amount of clients come out of need, not design,' explains Magalhaes, 'and they bring an image of a white box villa with them as a reference.' The practice's other co-founders are Ana Luisa Soares and Ahmed Belkhodja. The trio met working at Harry Gugger Studio in Basel in 2011 (Gugger having been central to Herzog & de Meurons's success). Magalhaes is from Porto and Soares from just outside, while Belkhodja is Swiss. Between them they have studied in Porto, Lausanne, Zurich, Ljubljana, Tokyo, Gothenburg and Singapore. They each worked in Japan too; Magalhaes at SANAA, Soares at Toyo Ito, and Balkhodja at Atelier Bow-Wow. Like many young southern EU citizens, Magalhaes and Soares left their country of origin because of the 2007/8 financial crisis, but they threw in their nice, safe, well-salaried jobs in Switzerland to return home at what was the bottom of the recession curve, and they invited Belkhodja to join them. They won work by being in the right place at the right time when there wasn't competition from other architects of their generation.
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