On Thursday 16th March the first lecture of the Spring Semester 2023 took place. Tiago Mota Saraiva from Lisboa talked among others about the cooperative «Working with the 99%» which he founded with his office «Ateliermob».

Ateliermob

Tiego Mota Saraiva is co-founder and partner of the Lisbon-based architecture firm Ateliermob, a multidisciplinary research, idea and design platform. The office believes that “architecture is more than just design.” For this reason, the partners have founded the cooperative “Working with the 99%” as an office offshoot. It accompanies participatory processes in the fields of housing and urban planning or participates in the formulation of public policies. Since 2020, Tiego Mota Saraiva has been a guest lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Lisbon and continues to be a member of the editorial board of the Portuguese edition of Le Monde Diplomatique. For the City of Lisbon, he also served as an external consultant for the implementation of the UN Agenda 21 action program.

Link website Ateliermob, Lisboa

Lecture series «Activisms»

Activism refers to individual or institutional actions that advocate for specific goals. These goals include, for example, environmental, social, or political actions to mitigate climate change or to address social inequalities. As architects, we could pursue the goal of designing places to stay, public spaces and buildings that are not only oriented towards economic interests or profit, but towards a building culture that is oriented towards the common good. The implementation of this is not always easy. What does activist work mean in practice and in studies? How can we as architects become capable of acting on our own initiative and take responsibility for our built environment?

The three architectural collectives Ateliermob, Harquitectes and TEN Studio will present to us on three evenings in the context of the lecture series “Activisms” how they develop their own projects, organize themselves as a collective and what activist work in architecture means to them.