Aires Mateus

"Beauty After All" is not an anthology or retrospective exhibition, but an exploration of the spatial investigations developed by the architects Aires Mateus over the last twenty years. It's not so much a question of presenting imagined, designed and/or built projects, but of showing how certain spatial ideas have led this duo.

Ideas that are not only operative in solving spatial and constructive problems, but are also linked to deep, sensitive and poetic research into materials, spaces, geographies, time and history. Through the ninety-one spatial representations on show, there are intense changes of scale, material and tactile diversities that transform this exhibition into a laboratory of physical, sensitive and beautiful experiences.

Brothers Manuel Aires Mateus (1963) and Francisco Aires Mateus (1964) founded the Aires Mateus studio in 1988; with 36 years of experience, the studio is now made up of around 50 professionals. In the teaching field, they have collaborated with various universities since 1986; they currently teach at the Autonomous University of Lisbon (since 1998) and at the Mendrisio Academy of Architecture in Switzerland (since 2001). The studio's work has received numerous national and international awards and has been exhibited at major international exhibitions, such as the Venice Architecture Biennale. The studio's work focuses on the role of memory and knowledge, on the relationship between a physical world and a cultural world. It seeks to reflect on all the scales that surround us, evoking the desire to draw. It seeks the perenniality of forms and materiality, the continuity of time.