FENDA

One of the first things with which people identify architecture is beauty. Beauty seems to be the added value of an architect and actually the reason why we are even hired: untrained citizens build uglily, architects beautifully.
Interestingly enough, more recently, one of the things for which we architects get more criticism is beauty as well. Perhaps because we architects have manipulated beauty in a very banal way, using overly estheticized buildings and spaces as a way to disguise the lack of content; or perhaps because we have abused beauty as a synonym of spectacle. No wonder a reactionary wave of neo-uglyism has been conquering the specialized media and captivating bloggers with assumptions like this: if a project is beautiful, it’s meaningless. If a project is ugly, it’s because it’s intelligent, or socially responsible.
But there are moments when architecture escapes this binary reductionism.
The architecture of Aires Mateus is one of those moments. For them beauty is not an added layer of good taste but the capacity to capture and express human desires. Their language, far from being a pleasant balm applied to forms, is a force that is able to penetrate and reveal the mystery of the human condition.
Their search for beauty is conducted through operations and languages capable of being familiar (anchored in old archetypes and therefore able to host life amicably) and simultaneously unexpected (expanding the experience of architecture into unexplored fields). What is more powerful in their approach is the capacity to make polarities coexist. Muscular yet abstract, monumental yet human, bold yet calm—these are some of the paradoxes that Aires Mateus’s architecture is able to reconcile. By doing so, beauty is actually a way to fight banality and transcend obsolescence.
All this is done without them speaking too much; perhaps because in their architecture beauty is an unspeakable certainty.