fala is a young Portuguese architecture studio, founded in 2013 by Filipe Magalhães, Ana Luisa Soares and Ahmed Belkhodja, later joined by Lera Samovich. They burst onto the international scene having come from a highly conservative architectural context in Portugal, where, seemingly, the sole priority was to perpetuate the holy trinity of Portuguese architecture, namely the central figure of Álvaro Siza, flanked by his forerunner Fernando Távora and his successor Eduardo Souto de Moura. But fala broke through without asking for permission, without having to bow down to that local scene; they were convinced that Portuguese architecture — if such a thing even exists, these days — should take a radically different approach instead. Many mistook this attitude for mere irreverence, but fala simply sought to reclaim their place as a generation within a scene that had been stagnant for decades. As they themselves put it in 2019, “fala is a combination of curiosity, ambitious youth, cynical naïveté, lack of seriousness, a simple fascination for architecture and our awkward humor. A humor that is used to say something serious.”1

fala is part of a new generation of architects who operate in international networks. They are the offspring of social media, and they harness its potential to reach a young audience who pack out lecture theatres whenever they give a talk (fala’s Instagram account has over 125,000 followers).B And the great advantage for this social-media generation — an unprejudiced generation, sceptical of old hierarchies — is that they can pick and choose their references, regardless of their geographical or temporal context. In other words, from Porto they can select their own heroes, even if they’re far away in space and time, and these chosen heroes can feel as close and familiar to them as someone like Álvaro Siza.

In this sense, we might draw an analogy with the experimental French group OulipoA (from Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, i.e. workshop of potential literature): one of their two main missions was to find and salvage their own precursors (those who partook in what they called “anticipatory plagiarism”). For fala, it’s not so much about upholding a tradition — if that were the case, there wouldn’t have been such a generational shift in Porto’s architecture, insomuch that fala’s work has so little in common with the local architecture of recent decades — but rather they try to find, in the past, those trajectories and works that have similar interests, to select like-minded people and allies with whom they can spark a dialogue: “Anything from the past that is good to the eyes of today is good enough to work from and that adoration is a good antidote to hubris. As a matter of fact, most of these people were or are still looking at precedents themselves.”2 This work of “anticipatory plagiarism” can clearly be seen in the way they constantly “quote” or allude to the architects of their own generation, as well as to others from bygone eras: from the ordinary, almost anonymous modern architecture of Porto, to the domestic Japanese architecture of the 1970s to the 1990s,3 from the work of Kazuo Shinohara to the pop architectures of Robert Venturi, from Toyo Ito to Mario Botta, from Memphis to Itsuko Hasegawa, from the forms of representation of OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen to the early computer-generated wire drawings by Japanese architects, from John Baldessari to David Hockney, from Ellsworth Kelly to Peter Märkli. Anything can be drawn into their lineage and into a particular “pop”-style visual imaginary; anything can be quoted in a way that is both unprejudiced and direct.

fala started out by building small houses, as well as numerous refurbishments of premises, flats or whole buildings, many of which were for Airbnb and mostly in Porto. The briefs for these early buildings were very similar, so certain aspects would get repeated from project to project, such as the recurrent use of bold colours, of certain geometries and graphic motifs, thus functioning almost as a kind of mechanism for quoting their own work. When revising these early projects, we feel an odd sensation of swirling around in an indistinguishable magma of curves, cut-off columns, stripes, discs, lines and circles.C Perhaps, in this initial period of their output, the key is not to understand a particular work, but rather to comprehend their broader approach. Their projects are exercises — much like working out at the gym — on the same themes, for which they must come up with solutions, again and again. These domestic works by fala are almost like a kind of seemingly infinite iteration, an imaginary of ways of living. Despite the studio’s short existence (they have been active for just over a decade), their exercises and iterations have gradually pieced together a larger architectural project, their architectural project, one which is constantly under construction.

“Elements appear almost by accident. A plan principle, a structural principle, a certain type of stripe, a vibrant colour, the exuberant shape of a kitchen hood, white walls, easy colours that emerge in slight disorder, wrong angles, curved walls and columns that hold nothing, grids of various kinds, frivolous or rigorous geometries…”4

#156

The Cookie Cutter Retreat (2021-24) is located in Sobral de Monte Agraço, in a rural setting near a village, north of the urbanised area of Lisbon. The retreat is home to a sort of international community of digital nomads who have drawn up their own, very open-minded constitution. The community in question has chosen this location due to its isolation from the urban centres, but also because it is close to Lisbon’s international airport, which is just half-an-hour away by car. Until recently, the community had been living in various houses around the village, and they eventually bought a huge plot of pretty uneven farmland that backs onto a motorway and the village. They commissioned fala to build their new facilities. Initially, these facilities were going to be the basic infrastructures that would allow them to take over the land — toilets, storage spaces, etc. — but the programme gradually expanded, and the architects decided to divide it into three parts. Although some members of the community still live in a rented house in the village, the new facilities are split between the three volumes: one building for a permanent residence, another for temporary residences, while the final (and largest) one would be a shared space for the community.

The project’s strategies for generation are based on logical and simple decisions. For example, with regards to the floor plans of the three buildings, fala opted to use the same shape for each one: a semi-circle, half a cheese wheel, which would vary in size according to the surface area required. All three are subdivided into two smaller parts by a line, which also varies to suit the programme: the medium volume is sliced into two halves, the small-sized volume is separated by a radial line, while the largest one is divided by a chord, a line on which all points are equidistant from the centre, thus isolating a sliver of the semi-circle. This progression of distinct sizes and lines, which split the floor plans in different ways, is echoed in the free-standing columns of the main glazed façades: no columns for the smallest building, one for the middle-sized building, and two for the largest one.

In terms of the volumes, the sole main façade of each semi-circle varies in both length and orientation, but the curved part is always a blank concrete wall that contains the earth from the plot itself. In the plan view the three volumes appear to be facing each other, but in reality they can barely glimpse one another since the topography prevents any direct visual contact between them; the only thing that hints at the whereabouts of the neighbouring, half-buried buildings are the facilities, colourfully painted and placed upon the garden rooftops of each one, and which serve as guiding beacons amid this uneven terrain. All the façades use the same materials: a large glass window that runs the whole length, with narrow mirrored bands at each end to hide the edge of the retaining wall; in turn, all of this is protected by a galvanised steel structure that holds up a simple, angled canopy, made from perforated sheet metal. Indoors, the materials are repeated: retaining walls and ceilings made from exposed reinforced concrete, terrazzo floors, doors and doorframes painted in vivid colours, marble countertops and bespoke furniture in galvanised steel.

However, all of these self-imposed rules for generating the floor plans and volumes — rules which might seem like a kind of absurd game — are topped off by a somewhat less evident layer of “quotations”. In the most secluded parts of the three buildings, the architects directly quote three fabulous houses that were all built in the same year, 1976. For fala, that was probably the best year for domestic architecture in the last century: in the smallest volume, the White U House (Nakano, Japan, 1976), built by Toyo Ito for his sister; in the medium-sized volume, the house that Frank O. Gehry built for himself, namely the Gehry Residence (Santa Monica, United States, 1976-77); and in the largest volume, they cite Beires’ House (Póvoa do Varzim, Portugal, 1973-76) by Álvaro Siza Vieira.

Beyond the fact that they were all built in 1976, we are not going to weigh up, here, the reasons why fala chose these particular houses over other ones (and I don’t think it’s particularly relevant anyway). Nevertheless, this resolve to quote them directly and superimpose them onto the semi-circular floor plans does have effects that are worth considering. In the smallest volume, the main curved space of Ito’s White U House clashes directly with the façade’s glass; in the medium volume, one of the bedrooms and a living area from Gehry’s house each make up a bedroom; and in the largest building, that of the shared services, the corridor from Beires’ House twists and turns along the narrow segment of the semi-circle, and thus also serves as an access corridor, this time not for the house’s main rooms, but for the shower rooms and toilets. Nothing from those houses seems to fit particularly well here, but it doesn’t really matter. That’s not the interesting thing about these quotations. In the words of one of the members of fala: “All processes that precede the built object (collage, drawings, and so forth) are architecture already, a choreography of fictions within the texture of the sensible world: present, fragile, intelligible, fleeting.”5

Although the architects are open and explicit about their direct quotations of the houses built by Ito, Gehry and Siza, we can still find other, more subtle allusions too, be they stylistic or historical, dispersed throughout the whole Cookie Cutter Retreat project. The strange staircase that takes up a prominent position in the large volume’s main room is the same as the one in the photographs taken by the philosopher Koji Taki of the Tanikawa House, (Naganohara Karuizawa, Japan, 1972-74), designed by Kazuo Shinohara; fala commissioned it especially for this project. The cylindrical columns with painted black-and-white stripes are just like the ones in some of Mario Botta’s projects; here, these are the free-standing columns, near the façades of the medium and large volumes. The colour palette used for the furniture, and on the interior carpentry, is similar to that used by Memphis, the Italian group. The façades of the three buildings immediately recall the façade of the house in Baião (Portugal, 1990-93), by Eduardo Souto de Moura; that house is also inserted into rural surroundings, and on a sloping plot. Finally, the seemingly random placement of rocks, which were extracted from the ground during the digging work required to semi-bury the buildings, is reminiscent of the sculptor Marcela Correa’s garden of monoliths; that garden is opposite the House for the Poem of the Right Angle (Vilches, Chile, 2010-12), built by Smiljan Radić for himself in the foothills of the Chilean Andes.

New phase

In literature, when you recognise a quotation from a certain creator in another’s work, it evokes not only the particular source text, but you also get a palpable sense of the whole oeuvre of that author. By quoting works in this way, we transcend the barrier between the living and the dead; words are snatched away from the dead, wrenched one from context so they can be highlighted in the present, so they can be revived or reinvented. The works quoted by fala reaffirm the authority of all the heroes that they choose to quote from.

In fala’s work, this unprejudiced game of quotations, be they direct or partial, is an exercise in critical reinterpretation, whereby the known elements acquire new meanings within a new way of composing architecture. The Cookie Cutter Retreat — as well as other works that the studio are currently working on — is unlike their early works, those built in Porto, which were perhaps naïve in their language and made use of numerous graphical motifs; this would seem to suggest that they are now entering into a new phase, one which is promising to be intense and fruitful. This particular project 156 shows that architecture can be both rigorous and playful at the same time, and that the balance between disciplinary order and spontaneity through language can be as erudite as it is accessible.

Epilogue by fala:
Thoughts, drawings, buildings, and words

Architecture, sometimes, is tangible. At least in the form of buildings, as they are constructed from tangible things such as walls, doors and windows, and they exist in the physical world. However, architecture also encompasses less tangible aspects, vulgarly described as ideas, intentions, or rhetoric.

Such intangible matters manifest intelligence in diverse forms, encompassing construction techniques, spatial arrangements, artistic representations (drawings and photographs), and verbal communication. Architecture is an art form that can evoke a sense of beauty in the balance between the subjective and objective aspects of its proposals.

While our practice often finds itself building conventional, local, and cheap buildings (of little cultural, social or economic relevance), we have developed an interest in exploring non-tangible themes via such work. Through our seemingly irrelevant objects and their processes, usually suburban and invisible, an intent emerges. Transcending the physical validity of its proponent, we hold a profound preference for these immaterial expressions and their sensitivity.

We declare that rhetoric matters more to us than the buildings that produce it and that are produced through it. Through a comprehensive array of graphic, visual, and verbal elements, the intangible is meticulously choreographed and fictionalised, transforming it into a intelligible and shareable entity. That is our main production and responsibility as a practice. Each building, and the collective of all buildings as a whole, is a means to an end.

Project 156 presents an intriguing prospect. It commences with a hopeful mandate and its resulting structure positively deviates from the majority of our previous commissions. Nevertheless, it remains integral to the same universe where the constructed object embodies a fleeting moment within an extended timeline, rather than signifying the culmination of the intangible production process. #156 as a building serves as an intermediate stage of a process and allows for the expansion of the collection of its representations.

It would be inaccurate to assert that a plan holds greater significance than a photograph, or that a building surpasses its plan. Buildings and their representations occupy a unique position between the tangible and the intangible dimensions of architecture.