Back from the Porto School, fortune brought us to this place; a vacant family house solved our need for accommodation, a childhood home an abandoned garden. This place had to be taken care of. 1. In a territory unfamiliar with the most sophisticated thinking about architecture and art, there is nothing heroic about this adventure. It was only a response to a new circumstance, using the tools we had: to be players of space, to be architects, especially attentive to contemporary artistic production. 2. We started by the garden and the trees, knowing how long it takes for them to grow. The works in the house also began: they are like an anti-project, more energy than demiurgy, solving each problem, each new embarrassment - "it's raining in the kitchen, we are freezing to death in the atelier...".

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Work started emerging, more outside than here. The recognition of that work granted us the municipal invitation to design a set of equipments and public spaces: the Rossio do Corvo arrangement, the recovery of the municipal and the Levante markets, the recovery of the medieval tower... Private commission resulted from public commission, The Rui Anahory house, the Falcão Meireles house, and, more recently, the house in Lobases, the Maria Mendes house, the house in Vale Açor, the house in Rabaçal, the house in Casal do Missa and the Quebra-Costas house. Meanwhile, the house that is also the Atelier became insufficient to lodge the vast number of models we were building and the books we were buying. We plan to transfer all our archives to two houses next to ours that have been bought: drawings, models, other documents and books, in a space open to anyone who shows interest. And then there is the Museum, Corvo’s Department, to quote Marcel Broodthaers: Musée d'Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, what for now occupies our thoughts...

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​* Corvo is a small village near Miranda do Corvo, Coimbra, where we live and work