“Fernando Távora’s rebellion against the Salazar regime’s austerity shifted the trajectory of architecture in Portugal. Across the latter half of the 20th century, the architectural praxis, production, and pedagogy of the Mediterranean country evolved, cultivating two Pritzker Prize-winning architects while fostering younger generations of designers to be received on the international stage. Among the younger generation that will lead the trajectory is OODA, a collective of five architects, who overlapped at and emerged from the Porto School in the early 2000s. Dispersing from school for locations worldwide, the architects came back together and then have marked ten years of practice with this publication. The work realized during this last decade, whether idea or built, exudes a cosmopolitan attitude and optimism. These characteristics can be traced across a range of projects, which vary in terms of scale, typology, program, and material. The diversity of the designs and the existing built work has origins in multiple sources: experience gained around the globe in notable offices; the ambition of the OODA partners to seek and attract collaborators operating at the top of the field; and a desire to realize in built form the “universal” ideal that Távora identified in a “local” approach. Architectural cosmopolitanism demands curiosity and a commitment to cultivating cultural, social, and tectonic awareness. It also requires the translation of this awareness to architectonic responses that can communicate with a global architectural community and, of paramount importance, with the contexts in which they appear and the public and private users they serve.”
