On Monday, the 23rd of January, Lunch with an Architect will be hosting the Portuguese architect Manuel Aires Mateus. He is one of the two brothers that head up the eponymous firm Aires Mateus, which employs 30 at its Lisbon offices.

Since Alvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura, Portuguese architecture has coined its own vocabulary and developed its own syntax, recognisable by its expressive minimalism. The Aires Mateus brothers are fluent in this language. Aires Mateus is a firm whose various projects communicate the fundamental principles of their architecture, managing a certain rigour without the coldness sometimes associated with it: the purity and simplicity of the design, an overall geometry that scrupulously gives due consideration to the internal volumes and a play between solids and voids sometimes interspersed with light, artificial or natural.

2017 will be a pivotal year for Aires Mateus with the opening of the Centre of Contemporary Creation in Tours, the Faculty of Architecture in Tournai or the on-going work on the ambitious projects of the new museum hub in Lausanne and the Muslim Centre in Bordeaux.

Flagey, F()rum