Catching up with Francisco Moura Veiga

Can you introduce yourself and walk me through your background?

I’m an architect, first and foremost, and for a long time, I was also editor of an architecture magazine, CARTHA Magazine. I’m very drawn to questioning what architecture is within the social context I am part of. Different people, different contexts, different architectures. That is, obviously, my own way of thinking about it.

The magazine was always about questioning what architecture is, its limits, who makes it, why they make it that way, always tied to this doubt I had—not entirely explicit, more latent—about why it was not different or better. Better not in the sense of being “more beautiful” but in doing good for everyone.

This led me to try to describe what “good architecture” is or could be according to four parameters. Three of them have existed since Vitruvius and architecture was first theorised. Vitruvius defined good architecture as being well built, as responding well to a building’s functional requirements, and as being beautiful: utilitas, firmitas and venustas. What I’d like to add, and this is something I also share with my students, because I also teach, is a fourth principle: civitas. If we see ourselves as social agents before architects, then design becomes far more powerful than “making something pretty”, “making something useful”, or “making something structurally stable”.

After living in Switzerland for so many years, you decided to return to Portugal and find a new home. How did you end up in Santarém?

In Santarém, we found something special. In a Swiss context, it would be obvious, but in Portugal, no one seemed to notice: half an hour from the capital by train, a district capital with good infrastructure, hospital, university, schools—though everything looked abandoned. And it still does, but it has evolved since we bought the houses—a whole ensemble of five houses—the seller actually forced us. It was those five or none at all.

The Pilot House was the first project you worked on when you moved to Santarém in 2021.

Yes. And we realised we could, with relatively little money, build or rebuild quickly if we let go of certain ideas of what architecture “should” be. There is a Giorgio Moroder intro on the Daft Punk album [Random Access Memories, 2013], where he talks about freeing himself from rules and preconceptions of what music should be, and that music can be whatever you want it to be.

We realised something similar here: if we were to drop those preconceptions, suddenly the kitchen, for example, could be made by the people who build industrial stainless-steel kitchens. That way you don’t have a seven-week lead time plus a carpenter who takes four weeks to install it. Instead, you get a professional kitchen unit that they build in a week, bring on a truck, and install in two hours. 

The urgency of the situation led us to a very playful approach to what the house could be. A house that had been a workshop and the caretaker’s room suddenly became an open space with two areas: in one, we slept in winter, and in the other we slept in summer, to deal with temperature swings and optimise how we heated the house. We lined everything with cork on the inside and used very cheap materials, like OSB boards painted with natural paint. We used whatever worked.

After the Pilot House, you started working on the House of the Future. How did that happen?

It was almost about building a house in the way houses used to be built. I’m not inventing anything; I’m reinterpreting techniques that were used in Portugal up until the end of the Second World War, or until we joined the European Union, and that were then completely replaced by the concrete lobby and the petrochemical industry around it.

The idea is to understand what makes sense in an “old house” along those four principles I mentioned: what is beautiful, what fulfils its function, what is well built, and what is good for the people around you. The answer was very simple: local and natural materials.

The walls you see here are new, even if they look old. They’re made with hydraulic lime, applied with very fine sand. Lime lets the walls breathe. Air moves through; the house breathes; humidity is well controlled; it filters the air; it’s antibacterial and antifungal. But this only works in systems built for it. You can put lime on a concrete wall, but it will only work partially.

So, the question becomes: how do you make the most of the situation you are in, with what you have at hand? 

Our projects turned into radius exercises. You have a question; you look inside the room you are in to see if there’s a possible solution there. If not, you look in the house. If not in the house, then on the land. If not on the land, the neighbouring streets, then the neighbourhood, the city, the district, the region, the country, the continent. That is how we started working. 

With the Pilot House, for example, we managed to find all the suppliers we needed in that radius—because, alas, some materials are not produced locally. I know perfectly well steel comes from China or India; there’s no way around it. It used to come from Ukraine as well, but now they need it for other things. But the suppliers, the people who are paid by us, are all within roughly fifty kilometres.

So it’s about minimising a bigger problem?

It’s more about how we can maximise our positive contribution to society. Because that also changes the energy of the process. If you design to avoid harm, you weigh yourself down with a kind of negative energy. I don’t believe in Taoism and that sort of thing, but I do believe attitude matters. We realised the answer had to do with pleasure instead.

People ask whether we’re like “eco-fanatics” or something. No. This is not about “the environment”. We’re doomed either way; nature will go on without us. We’re thinking about how we can help ourselves and those around us with the little we have. That is what defines this architecture.

And the visual appeal comes out of that?

Yes and no. It also comes from another conceptual and societal construction that we carry with us. I’m heavily influenced by classical ideas of proportion and symmetry, and I also love sci-fi and postmodern culture. That all blends into something very personal. But there’s one thing I’ll never compromise on: I’ll never make something beautiful with bad materials, bad practices, or bad people.

If you had to describe the House of the Future, how would you do it? As a project, as a concept, but also beyond these? 

Let’s call it a provocation. A humble provocation, perhaps, because we’re very aware of our limitations. It’s also a response to our immediate needs as a family of four, but also as an extended family. The house was designed to welcome us now, with guests, friends and family visiting from abroad, and also to be easily divided in the near future into two units by closing a single door: one apartment for my parents and one for us—with a shared kitchen so we can cook for them when they’re no longer able to. It’s a multigenerational house. Literally a house of and for the future.

There are several layers of what the future means here.

Yes, absolutely. There’s the personal future, the future of construction and architecture—by relying on local materials that support how you inhabit the house—and there’s also the climatic future. Think of the last heatwave, for example: the house is designed to cope with extremes. It’s built for that future, too, which will undoubtedly get worse. We had floods here this winter, too. We had to evacuate. The house gave in a little, but the water came and went pretty quickly.

What would you like to leave for the future, for your kids? What does this house represent in that sense? Is this house, and the others, a project you imagine lasting over time?

If we look at Johan Huizinga and his Homo Ludens: when you design for a child, and you define a single function that an object can have, you’ve already lost. If it’s monofunctional, the kid will lose interest. Or you’ll be contributing to that kid’s underdevelopment.

What we believe—and what I define as playful design—is that you always have to leave the door open for things to be appropriated in ways you cannot predict. But you have to design potentially indeterminate structures for that to happen. If everything is overly defined, if a house is exactly what the architect wants it to be forever, it’s incredibly boring.