atelier local : after five years of living
Softcover: 132 pages
Dimensions: 14x19 cm
Publisher: EXEMPLO
Author: João Paupério, Maria Rebelo
Editor: Diogo da Graça, Roberto Soares
Language: English
ISBN: 978-989-33-6973-9
Abstract:
As Alison & Peter Smithson once suggested, the act of writing a book is, in many respects, akin to designing a building. Both acts give tangible form to an arrangement of ideas, gathering others along the way and multiplying their meaning through an exercise in synthesis and composition. In both cases, what is omitted holds as much weight as what is included.Yet this comparison is more than convenient metaphor. Beyond this analogy between buildings and books, there are also parallels and affinities in the very process of making them.
In atelier local: after five years of living, the authors offer a reflective analysis — at once retrospective and introspective — on a selection of projects and buildings that shaped the first five years of their architectural practice. This formative period was marked by projects undertaken under conditions that were, at best, adverse: the precarity of commissions, meagre budgets, the bureaucratic machinery of urban planning departments, the manifold dimensions of the ongoing ecological crisis, as well as the scarcity and inflation of construction materials spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic and various armed conflicts.
For architecture to find a space of possibility within such constraints, these five years were characterised by a sustained theoretical effort — to read these conditions with critical acuity, to learn how to subvert and manipulate them, and to draw from imposed frugality not only resignation and resilience, but mostly resistance and the will to imagine new modes of life — simpler, freer.
This impulse towards transformation, towards the shared and critical reflection on the conscious organisation of space, is perhaps the one inescapable trait of architecture as a discipline. Therefore, this publication arose naturally from these circumstances — from the reflection borne of working under such pressures, and from a desire to share that reflection with friends and fellow travellers. In this spirit, much like the projects it portrays, the book-object itself was conceived in the same spirit of economy and intent — weaving together existing images and reordering the recurring thoughts that animate the studio’s daily life. It is built from humble materials: thin paper, laser-printed pages, and a pared-down kraft paper cover, bearing nothing but the title printed in red. A freely available typeface, arranged on the page without mise-en-page gimmicks, with generous line spacing that invites the reader to mark thoughts, pose questions, and engage critically with what has just been read.
In essence, this modest, pocket-sized volume harbours no grander ambition than to suggest that advancing the practice and theory of architecture requires not ornament nor pretence — merely the will to question and criticize the world as we found it.
Text by João Paupério and Maria Rebelo.