Arquitetura Entre Vistas ABROAD

This week, we travel to Neuchâtel, Zurich and Lausanne to meet Anna MacIver-ek and Axel Chevroulet, the duo behind MacIver-ek Chevroulet. Their practice seeks “precision as a tool to achieve an architecture sensitive to its context and generous to its users” - yet for them, precision is inseparable from freedom.

Where lies the balance between control and release? “Sometimes you go to the toilet and when you come back, things have been decided.” Architecture, after all, is a shared process - unpredictable, collective, and alive.

“We started to learn to love this idea of constraints.” Limits, they say, are fertile ground - shaping creativity rather than restricting it. That is how breaking down, reassembling, and connecting become part of their design language, almost “like a motor, you can tear the buildings apart and reuse certain elements.”

They are fascinated by connections, both literal and conceptual. “The connections used to be in the center of architecture but disappeared with the use of concrete that is able to hide all the connections.” What was once visible became hidden, and they seek to bring that clarity back: “Screwing, nailing, or simply placing one thing on top of another. (…) Making knots is insanely efficient. (…) We’re hoping to use magnets soon.”

“You need to have freedom in every scale of representation… everything works in a sketch and nothing works in a sketch.” Between drawings, models, and images, they navigate multiple kinds of precision. “No medium is less precise than another; it is just another type of precision.”

“It’s part of the job to be lost,” they say.
But fear not, “if you have the right process, somehow, you will find a way through.”

Guests: Anna MacIver-ek + Axel Chevroulet (Neuchâtel + Zurich + Lausanne, Switzerland)
Host: Ana Catarina Silva (Porto, Portugal)

This week, we travel to Gothenburg and Stockholm, Sweden, to meet Johan Olsson and Andreas Lyckefors, co-founders of Olsson Lyckefors Arkitekter. Together since 2005, they lead a practice of around thirty architects and interior designers — and three dogs.
For them, each project is unique — “a unique period of time, a unique client, a unique place.” What carries through from one work to another is not a style, but a method: “of course we have things that continue from project to project, but that has more to do with methods than the outcome.”
They refuse the idea of a fixed aesthetic. “It would be unrespectful to keep an aesthetics over and above everything we do.”, they say. Architecture, for them, begins with listening: “listening is gold. Talking is silver.”
To embrace change, to adapt, to extract meaning from constraints, this is their way of working. “In the future we will do architecture in a way we don’t know yet. We cannot be stuck in preconceived ways of doing things.”
Guests: Johan Olsson + Andreas Lyckefors (Gothenburg + Stockholm, Sweden)
Host: Ana Catarina Silva (Porto, Portugal)

This episode is sponsored by J&JTeixeira.

Upload your references to: arquiteturaentrevistas.com
Spotify: Arquitetura Entre Vistas
Instagram: @arquiteturaentrevistas

This week, we travel to Aachen and Stuttgart to meet AMUNT, founded in 2009 by Björn Martenson, Sonja Nageland Jan Theissen.

AMUNT reinvent the existing. They pay attention to the quirky, the overlooked, the oddly specific. “There are ideas in these quirky things, that’s why we collect them.” But collecting is only the beginning. For AMUNT, these observations become operative: “to transfer means the possibility to bring something new to the vocabulary of architecture”. I agree.

Each project begins with context - not as something given, but as something constructed. “Everybody can create their own context… you design what you think is your context.” This openness also allows for letting go: “at some point, it becomes the client’s project on the inside, and we let go”. Wise.

Constraints play a central role. “We like to take benefits out of constraints… these constraints form a kind of character”. Within limits, they find freedom. “It helps you to find, in the sea of possibilities, a solution that is not just based on taste (…) If we have at least 2 reasons for something, then it’s really good”.
In the end, everything has a character: imperfect, specific, quietly alive…waiting to be found.

Guests: Björn Martenson + Sonja Nagel + Jan Theissen (Aachen + Stuttgart, Germany)
Host: Ana Catarina Silva (Porto, Portugal)

Upload your references to: arquiteturaentrevistas.com
Spotify: Arquitetura Entre Vistas
Instagram: @arquiteturaentrevistas

#ArquiteturaEntreVistasABROAD #ArquiteturaEntreVistas #AMUNT #ArchitecturePodcast #ContemporaryArchitecture #GermanArchitecture #DesignProcess #ArchitecturalThinking #ReinventingTheExisting #ArchitecturalContext #ArchitectureLovers

Today, we travel to Zurich to meet Emanuel Christ, who, together with Christoph Gantenbein, founded Christ & Gantenbein in 1998.

With them, I learned that “form is communication”. As Aristotle would say it as a syllogism: “Form is language. Language is communication. Therefore, form is communication.”

But can we truly communicate if we invent our own language? Or if we aim for anonymity in the forms we use?

For Emanuel Christ, a good building speaks, “a good building speaks with other buildings; a good building speaks about other buildings.” Architecture, he argues, is a civic art, “it belongs to everybody. So please speak a language that can be understood by the majority of people, and at the same time, make it surprising, make it fresh, make it original.”

“Form is never an isolated thing per se.” It is typological, compositional, tectonic - a synthesis of thought and construction. Each project contributes to the evolution of a type: “the best projects have a clear typological principle that produces exceptions and frictions.”

For Christ, architecture is dialogue between past and present, the general and the specific, the universal and the local. Always familiar, yet always new.

Guest: Emanuel Christ (Zurich, Switzerland)
Host: Ana Catarina Silva (Porto, Portugal)

Upload your references to: arquiteturaentrevistas.com
Instagram @arquiteturaentrevistas
Follow for more thoughts on architecture.

This week, let’s travel to Rotterdam, Paris and Zurich to meet André Kempe and Oliver Thill, two German architects who founded Atelier Kempe Thill in 2000.
Talking about simplicity can be a complex task — but today, we take on that challenge. For Kempe and Thill, architecture is “the creation of order in the world of chaos.” “The world is already too complex,” they say, “and a piece of architecture can create a moment of order.” Yet simplicity, for them, is not effortless — “it takes a lot of effort to do something that at the end looks rather simple.”
Typology stands at the core of their thinking — “in typology there is a lot of collective knowledge.” The plan, followed by the section, becomes a tool for clarity. Their architecture resists spectacle: facades are rigorous, interiors quiet, and repetition reveals rather than hides logic.
Ultimately, “there is an order — but one that can always be a little bit stretched.” Between reason and softness, their work searches for balance — between the ideal and the real.
Guests: André Kempe + Oliver Thill (Rotterdam, Paris, Zurich)
Host: Ana Catarina Silva (Porto, Portugal)
Upload your references to: arquiteturaentrevistas.com
Spotify: Arquitetura Entre Vistas
Instagram: @arquiteturaentrevistas