ARX Portugal Arquitectos

Started in Berlin (1991) by Nuno Mateus and José Mateus, ARX Portugal is an architecture office based in Lisbon.

Our architecture doesn’t follow a lexicon or a stabilized language. In every new project we try to find the “vocables” for a specific language to the new context. More than searching common points between each new project and the previous, our interest focus more on finding differences. It is as if we were always returning to zero. And, at a certain level, that is our conception of innovation.

Evidently this approach also opens up a vast research field. Not having to work within rigid precepts, we search an experimental path where we can test new concepts starting from what interest and fascinates us. Meanwhile, wise seem to us the words of the Brazilian poet and philosopher António Cícero that once said: “what is interesting, it is not much writing something new, but writing something that the reading doesn’t date it.”

The future is always hard to predict, but, com-probingly, after the revolutions, of the disinterest in history and the globalization, there will be certainly a return to the local, to the specific, to the architecture made of small but solid impulses from the things that arrive to us.