TC 177/78- João Mendes Ribeiro

This double issue brings together, across 406 pages, twenty-five years of work by the Portuguese architect João Mendes Ribeiro (Coimbra, 1960) through eighteen works built in Portugal and Spain between 2000 and 2026. Trained in Porto and assistant to Fernando Távora in Coimbra during the 1990s, Mendes Ribeiro has developed a singular career in which architecture, theatre set design and the design of objects and interiors feed into one another. The result is an architecture that tends towards the essential, attentive to the truth of materials and to the scale of the body, and that understands construction as a precise and reversible assembly. His work has received, among others, the FAD, BIAU, RIBA International Excellence and Secil Architecture awards.

A large part of the selection is devoted to intervention in heritage buildings, a field in which the studio is a point of reference: the Centre for Visual Arts in the former Colégio das Artes in Coimbra, the Casa da Escrita, the cloister of Lorvão Monastery, the São Pedro do Sul Roman Baths, the Palace of the Counts of Ourém and the old Aveiro train station. These are works in which the aim is not to leave a contemporary mark, but to re-inhabit what already exists. Alongside them are single-family houses (Fonte Boa, Chamusca da Beira, the Chestnut House, Arruda dos Vinhos and the house in Vilar de Astrés, Ourense, his only work in Spain), small-scale pieces such as the Tea House at Montemor-o-Velho Castle, and public buildings such as Arquipélago in the Azores and the Torre de Palma Wine Hotel.

As is customary in the series, each work is presented with extensive graphic documentation (plans, sections and construction details) together with photography.

Three essays complete the volume and explore the studio's parallel practices. Antoni Ramon Graells examines his set design, awarded the Gold Medal at the Prague Quadrennial in 2007. Bárbara Coutinho addresses the performative space of his exhibitions, installations and interiors. Ricardo Merí de la Maza, editor of the monograph, draws on a conversation with the architect to read his work as a transmutation of the object in space.