Category: Articles
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Whitman, Koolhaas and Siza – The Beauty in Contradiction
“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes”* It’s 4:04PM and I just got inside a library designed by architect Álvaro Siza Vieira. It’s my first time in this city, just one hour away from Porto (Portugal). “You should try the berliners at Natário‘s; there’s a hot…
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Space Democratization: from the Oval Office to your garage
Last Friday (June, 19) comedian Marc Maron interviewed President Barack Obama. “I will be talking with the President of the United States, in my garage! It’s crazy! It’s crazy…” said Maron, just a few seconds before the President arrived. This event was something that Maron questioned if it was really going to happen. After understanding that in fact…
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From Rucker Park to Madison Square
Try to imagine what it would be like to see Lebron James playing in your neighborhood. In Harlem, away from the chaotic epicenter of Manhattan, is a basketball court just like many others if not the fact that both amateur and professional players have played here. Stars like Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Kevin Durant or Julius…
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Living under a bridge
Have you ever witnessed the expression “living under a bridge” applied in real life? For anyone arriving at or leaving the Sete Rios train station close to Lisbon’s financial district, it is quite a view. For some people, at first it can be disquieting to see how a margin of people are currently living. But…
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Copy Oscar
In the documentary “Visual Acoustics” about photographer Julius Schulman’s work, one of the buildings presented is externally inspired on Oscar Niemeyer’s Alovarada Palace. Although very easy to criticize this building when compared to the original, the Coachella Valley Bank building, in Palm Springs – and all other copycats that came after, as the result of the work developed by…
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Why IKEA’s Cafeteria Can Be Your Next Office
“I’m at IKEA…. Yeah…. I’m working….” says a Megan-Fox-lookalike on the phone, with a somewhat blase voice. She’s in a table next to mine, swiping and typing on her iPad. Her office-like black belted-pencil-skirt and white fitted-shirt contrasts with the relaxed look of the lime-green plastic chair she is seated on. She is part of one of…
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Let us be kind. A lesson about Siza.
“I hereby schedule an interview/conversation with architect Siza Vieira, suggesting the date January 27th (Sunday) at noon”. On that day Oporto welcomed us with rain. We arrived early to the street where the offices of the two Portuguese Pritzker Prize winners are located. While we stood under the garage entrance, we saw him arrive in…
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Fallingwater House & why “everybody” wants to be an architect
“When I was in younger I wanted to be an architect!”. This is for sure one of the most common things architects hear. And when we do, we feel proud with ourselves (even a bit vain) and we end up not knowing what to say. “That house made me want to be an architect” or…
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Next Stop: Pittsburgh
Eight hours after leaving the office in NYC, I had arrived to Pittsburgh around midnight. I was there visiting João, a friend of mine who is a Portuguese PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University. In my first two months in New York, this was the first time I had left it. And although I had not…
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NYC – Water Towers
Before setting foot into this complex island, I would look at pictures of water towers on rooftops and think that they were some sort of extinct industrial structures on top of buildings way outside the city. The truth is that there are thousands of them here and they have been around for some time and…
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The Importance of People & Dave Chappelle’s Block Party
For those of you who have moved to a another city for the first time, you will understand this inescapable truth: at some point you will eventually get in a wrong bus, and you will notice that you have made a big mistake in choosing that particular route. And you have to get off before…
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Mies is in the detaiLs
Along with The Economist building in London, designed by Alice and Peter Smithson, The Seagram building in New York, designed by Mies van der Rohe, is one of the most interesting examples a 20th century office building that creates quality public space in the city center. Mies’ “less is more” is perfectly reflected in this…
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Above Us All
While Banksy is still clowning around in his “New York Tour”, I found this somewhat surreal vision (I believe on 6th Ave). How strange is it that this figure/entity is so ubiquitous that we don’t even notice its presence anymore?
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Delirious (about) New York
I closed the office door and noticed that people were standing in the corridor. They were looking through the windows, in front of the elevators, to this beautiful sunset. After they left, I stayed there for awhile. (This would influence what happened no more than 5 minutes after). Behind a door I could hear this…
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Nice to see you
In 2008, I had an interview with David Adjaye, in one of his visits to Lisbon. Back then, I remember him presenting an intriguing house, located in Brooklyn. Has he said, this house “captured the same mood” has Dirty House did, in London. Once you spend some time understanding the design of both houses, you can’t…
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US, PIIGS…
And here we are before a failed European economic model. Obverse to the US and Japan, we – PIIGS, GIPSIs, whatever you want to call us – cannot count on anything more than deflation as a mechanism to compete – yes, compete – with the economies of central Euro Zone. That’s why we are peripheral.…
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