Opening of the Aires Mateus Exhibition at Serralves

DATE

28.11.2025

Far from a traditional retrospective, the exhibition proposes a journey through the ideas that have guided the architects over the past two decades, revealing how their work is situated in an ongoing dialogue between memory, materiality and time. The exhibition starts from the premise that architecture is a way of inhabiting the world, understanding the house —as Emanuele Coccia suggests— as a place that gathers and protects what makes happiness possible.

The exhibition does not seek merely to display completed projects or recognisable models, but to reveal the spatial intuitions that have shaped the practice of Manuel and Francisco Aires Mateus. Their investigations go beyond functional or technical resolution, entering a poetic territory where materials, voids, shadows and geographies become tools for thought. The exhibition allows visitors to discover how these ideas have evolved and how they continue to nourish their particular way of understanding architecture.

Through ninety-one spatial representations, the visitor experiences radical shifts in scale and a tactile and material diversity that transforms the exhibition into a sensory laboratory. Each piece becomes an entry point for exploration: from volumetric studies that address the essence of form, to constructive experiments that reformulate the relationship between space and the body. The experience invites active contemplation, in which looking, touching and moving through the works become fundamental to understanding the studio’s practice.

Founded in 1988, Aires Mateus is today one of the most internationally recognised Portuguese ateliers, with a team of around fifty professionals and a trajectory presented in leading institutions such as the Venice Architecture Biennale. Their work focuses on the permanence of forms and the tension between the physical and the cultural, with constant attention to knowledge and memory. The exhibition, produced by the Serralves Foundation – Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by Nuno Crespo, with coordination by Cassandra Carvas, the Aires Mateus Atelier itself and Diana Cruz, stands as an exceptional opportunity to delve into the studio’s sensibility and creative depth.

MARCH VALENCIA | ARQUITECTURA Y DISEÑO

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