Library in Caminha. Photo Credits: André Cepeda

Small Studio Snapshots is one of Archinect’s regular recurring series. In it, we take a look at the ins and outs of running a small-scale practice. What hurdles do you come across? Do you want to grow or stay small and flexible? What motivates your practice in the first place?

In this excerpt from a special iteration for Ed, we talk with the Portuguese practice Brandão Costa Arquitectos led by Nuna Brandão Costa.

How large is Brandão Costa Arquitectos? And why did you start working together?

We are a very small office—at the moment, we have around five people. This changes according to the amount of work. We keep it a small practice because of the way we intend to work on projects.

How would you describe the ethos of your practice? What motivates your work?

I'm very interested in the building site and in the final shape of the building. So we start projects the way any architect starts: with an idea for the site and an idea for the program. But very soon we start thinking about the projects in its final, built shape and in the way we are going to build. What are the techniques we are going to use? How are we going to put it up? I'm really interested in the final building form and shape and the functionality of the building.

A project is a step toward what is really the goal, which is to put it up, built. In a way, we keep designing while we are building, while we are under construction. I think what we try to achieve is the quality of the building, the quality of the space for real, when it's been finished.

What are some of the difficulties you've encountered in starting and running your practice?

Well I started in the late '90s—I was very young, 28 or something—because I won a few public competitions. Over the course of the last ten years in Portugal, there have been a lot of difficulties because we had a big financial crisis and there was not so much work. But we kept fighting and we kept the same goals as always, which is to make good architecture to give to society—which is, in a way, what we all try to do with architecture—and to keep building with quality. Even if we have less money and less work, you can do a little bit more in order to maintain quality and good design in order to give people good spaces in which to live. I think that's how it works or at least what we tried to do, even in these difficult times.

How did the Caminha library project get started?

That's a good example because that project took a very long time to realize. It was a selected competition that the mayor of Caminha made ten years ago in 2005. I was able to win this competition because they thought our proposition was the most interesting. We started doing the project in the normal process and then came the crisis—and the process got very very slow, eventually stopping altogether.

Finally, in 2015, two years ago, the new mayor decided finally to build the project. In a way, we didn't change anything—it was the original project. We made some small changes on the infrastructural level to lower a bit the price. And we just built it.

Now it's done and I'm very happy because it was a very difficult project. It was to build a new building with new facilities for a library but in a very old village environment. It's a medieval ambience, which makes it quite a difficult context. The challenge was to do this dialogue between the new building with the new shape and make it talk with the old structures of the medieval city.

You adapted two existing structures. Tell me more about this.

The site was made of two parts: one was an old house from the 19th century—or 18th, maybe, it was a structure that was the old prison of the village, which was made of several parts, including this little house that we had to work with—and then there was a plot that was empty. So I decided to keep the old sites that were still in a proper state, and we ‘re-built’ the ancient volume with its original shape. It's a speculative exercise but we based it on the old plan. And then we made this extension with a totally different shape, a triangular shape. At the same time, this triangular shape comes from analyzing the old city, where we see this contrast between the fabric of the old buildings with a sort of Cartesian, rectangular structure, and then there is the old defense wall, from the 12th or 13th century. In Portugal, these walls have a triangular shape in order to make it more difficult to breach. There are still some parts of this wall in Caminha, so I thought that somehow the building could recreate this concept—between the triangular walls and the fabric that is more regular. There was a sort of ambiguity between the new building, with a totally new shape, that contrasts clearly with the old fabric that, at the same time, has a form that derives from a very old structure.

To find out more about the project, get your hands on a copy of Ed #1 The Architecture of Architecture here!