I am a Portuguese-born, British architect, writer, and artist, currently Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Inscriptive Practices Lead at the Manchester School of Architecture, where I also co-lead Future Processes. My academic journey has taken me from the University of Lisbon to the University of California, Berkeley, and now to the Bartlett School of Architecture, where I am completing my PhD in Architecture by Design.
At the heart of my work lies a fascination with the unknown, the unformed, and the not-yet. My research moves between speculative drawing, visual studies, and experimental architecture, seeking to explore how architecture may be imagined, constructed, and thought otherwise. Through the lens of speculative assemblies, I engage with visual and spatial constructs that resist closure—embracing abstraction, ambiguity, and cross-disciplinary encounters as methods to unsettle conventional modes of architectural production.
With over fifteen years of experience in practice, including at Richard Rogers and Partners, my work bridges the precision of professional architecture with the open-endedness of experimental inquiry. As founder of Speculative Assemblies, I approach drawing not as a static image, but as a living apparatus—a site where representation becomes invention, and where architecture emerges as an ongoing negotiation between thought, matter, and form.
In my practice, drawing is never an end in itself, but a continuous unfolding—an active, speculative field where architecture is always in the process of becoming.
Speculative Assemblies is a research-driven experimental design lab exploring architectural spatial constructs through representational inquiry and material experimentation.
DRAWING FORWARD
Drawing Forward is a platform exploring drawing as a speculative research tool, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue, and generating new knowledge.
ARCHILIBS
ARCHILIBS (Architecture Ad Lib) is a research platform examining the generative potential of language—treating words not as mere descriptors, but as operative tools
L A B O U R S
MY CORE TEACHING AREAS
Conceptual & Experimental Drawing
Drawing as a method of research, invention, and provocation. Not to describe architecture, but to speculate, fictionalise, and reveal its hidden logics.
Visual Studies in Architecture
The visual construct not just as output, but as epistemic engine — tracing how visuals generate thought, spatial affect, and forms of knowing.
Architecture as Thought Practice
Engaging architectural design through philosophical methods — critical theory, media studies, poetics — outside the conventional boundaries of practice.
Speculative Assemblies
Assemblies not as tectonic construction, but as conceptual, visual, and affective constructs — ways of holding together ideas, fragments, stories, logics, contradictions.
Radical Methodologies
Working with tools, techniques, and processes that sit outside (or against) architecture’s disciplinary norms — including cinema, notation, AI, narrative, diagram, montage, and performative image-making.
