Manuel Aires Mateus
PT
Manuel Aires Mateus was born in Lisbon in 1963. He graduated from the Lisbon School of Architecture in 1986 and collaborates with his brother Francisco Aires Mateus in the practice Aires Mateus, which they founded together in 1988. He has taught in several universities since 1986, such as the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Oslo Architecture School and the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Ljubljana, among others. Since 1998, he teaches at the Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa and, since 2001, at the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio, Switzerland. Aires Mateus has participated in several Venice Architecture Biennales and his practice was also present at the Architecture Biennale Villa et Culture in Rabat (Morocco, 2018), at Milan Design Week (2017) and at the Chicago Architecture Biennial. They were recently at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (2021) with the project TO INHABIT. The studio has also been awarded several national and international prizes, including the AIT Award, Valmor Prize, Secil Prize, FAD Awards, Ecola Prize, ENOR Prize as well as the prize of the Ibero-American Urban Planning and Architecture Biennale and has been selected for the Mies van der Rohe Prize. In 2017, Manuel Aires Mateus was awarded the Pessoa Prize. The studio’s work has always dealt with the role of memory and knowledge, with the relationship between the physical and the cultural world. The work seeks to reflect on every scale surrounding us. It searches for the perennial state of shapes and materiality in the continuity of time.