Fala Atelier is a Portuguese architecture firm led by three principal architects, Filipe Magalhães, Ana Luisa Soares and Ahmed Belkhodja. Their diverse educational backgrounds play a vital part in the two partners’ ideas and approaches, setting them apart from the conceptual framework that most European architects center themselves around.

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One of the most important ideas that set Fala Atelier’s works apart is the instinctual force that sometimes cannot be explained nor understood through a simple analysis. It’s the instinct they have in the ability to interpret functions, humans’ use of spaces and unique characteristics of each work, including the ‘rhetoric,’ which all the three architects consider to be vital. Fala Atelier explains their style of working as naive. These instinctively derived thoughts cannot be proven about whether they’re good or not but the three believe in the purity of such primary ideas, and their ability to draw a framework for each project from those ideas. After each work gets developed further, there are certainly other complicated issues that end up affecting the work itself or even become a tool in the way a design is developed, especially when considering the fact that each project is expected to provide the most suitable answer to questions raised and existing in the ‘real world’.

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Therefore, Fala Atelier’s works first appear in their primary forms such as drawings and collages that look and feel childlike, and communicate straightforwardly so that they can be easily understood. The language that is formed later is uttered through the simplification of forms. The three never view these methods as unfitting or superficial in their architecture but as a tool that helps people understand, form or read the relationship between themselves and Fala Atelier’s architecture.