BIENNIAL PROJECT
Nine Symbolic Spaces
This project is based on the work of Japanese architects Kazuo Shinohara, Itsuko Hasegawa, Toyo Ito, and Kazunari Sakamoto from the period of 1969 to 1977. It is comprised of nine projects that make sense as a collection of old and remote buildings existing here and now: nine photographs capture a fragment of the space, nine photographs with precise and very well defined compositions, simple and carefully calculated gestures. Nine, not one, it couldn’t be limited to just one image, because we love them too much to choose and we value the energy of the moment even more than the authorship of a single architect. These images go backwards to the project via photography to rediscover the spatial entities with their complexities and discontinuities: nine houses that could almost be one house; nine rooms or nine living spaces that could be parts of one building; nine houses that share traits, perhaps even a language; and four architects and nine houses that somehow made sense together—as if parts of a single, untold project.
BIO
Fala is a naïve architecture practice based in Porto led by Filipe Magalhães, Ana Luisa Soares, and Ahmed Belkhodja. Established in 2013, the atelier works with methodic optimism on a wide range of projects—from territories to birdhouses.
