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Picasso, or Ireland with James Joyce. How
strongly are you doing your work from a Por-
tuguese perspective?
ESM: What I like most about Portugal is the
atmosphere, the mood. Architecture is not only
physical. If you design a chair, you can do it
alone in one week, but designing something in
a place, in a country, involves thinking about
many other things. That is the reason why
architecture is a social matter. To obtain a
high quality in architecture you have to think
about time, material, craftsmen, a good rela-
tion with the client… There is no good building
with a bad client.
JP: When I was in Doha teaching, I could
not think of designing anything there, because
I would not know where to start. In my experi-
ence it is a city that has no place at all. It is
just a limitless placelessness.
ESM: The car and the hotel. But this matter
of the regional and the local is very interest-
ing. I talked about it with Frampton, who
always defends regionalism. I think it is a bit
ridiculous right now to talk about regional-
ism as it was understood before, today there
is a new regionalism. Pachi Mangado, for
instance, comes often to Portugal because he
is very interested in Portuguese crafts, and he
comes to discuss this thing or the other with
the craftsmen. It is a team. And I feel more
identified with this kind of work than the one
they develop in Lisbon, for instance. It is not
a question of rivalry, but of empathy.
JP: I feel the same, since Finland has the
tradition of not talking. In my observation, in
Finland the quality of architecture is better
when there is a crisis (economic, political, or
social) and it goes down when there is a period
of wealth, when everything is taken for granted.
I don’t think architecture can exist without the
belief that there is a future. Architecture is
grounded on hope.
ESM: When people ask me, “Eduardo, what
would you say to young architects in this time
of crisis?” I say that I have always worked in a
time of crisis. It is good to represent an opposi-
tion to crisis. In Chinese, crisis has two mean-
ings: change and project. It is always positive.
You must be careful also, because there is a lot
of opportunism. Clients, for instance, always
try to reduce budgets and so on…
«It is a bit ridiculous
right now to talk about
regionalism as it was
understood before, today
there is a new regionalism»
