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The places are analysed and synthesised by OODA in diagrams that create empathies of abstraction and figuration. Necessity, scalability and subjectivity become part of the architecture, with images and languages ​​that reflect the environment and to which is added the resilience of the place.

There is always a need between generic and specific culture for authenticity. Nowadays, heritage is a profitable and exportable business as well as a cultural and social stage. Regarding the cultural and instrumental dimension of the existing raw material, with its structural or functional erosions, the OODA collective develops a modus operandi capable of, with loyalty and disciplinary vitality, introducing immunologies that are useful to provide it with second and other additional lives.

The house is a functional and cultural product, an intimate object of communication and connection with the individual, the result of transformations that have always been associated with the understanding of time and space interaction from the welcoming view of a mountain to the envelopment of the exterior of a valley.

Never, as today, has architecture had an immaterial ambition. Therefore, it seeks motivations and impurities from external cultures that it can refer to and give meaning. Materiality and functionality are combined with the need for personality and potential, useful resources for a collective speech on architecture. The resulting image and language are also more flexible, simultaneously universal and consensual.

The Tower of Babel, idealised and materialised to bring the earth and sky closer, is a transversal theme to architecture and to many other disciplines such as literature, painting or sculpture. Today, the diversity of languages, ​​and consequently, the multiplicity of images in architecture, is no longer a fatality. It is, rather, the demonstration of its infinite potential and capacity.

The projects selected for this alignment and cognitive development – Montevideu 156 (2018), Foco (2018), Luanda Bay Hotel (2018), Alameda das Antas (2018), Douro Hotel and Winery 2 (2019), CCB Extension (2019 ), Catim (2020) and Botanical Hotel (2020) – are based on current global and regional genealogies that give continuity to ancient languages ​​and images with access to a vast external and internal archive.

According to Valter Hugo Mãe, we were all born to a thousand fathers and a thousand mothers. This idea reminds us of The Genealogy of Morals written by Friedrich Nietzsche in 1887, a philosophical and historical investigation that admits the diversity and plurality of meanings present in the judgment of good and evil, capable of stimulating or preventing evolution. Both explain to us how, after all, the dream, like architecture, changes our life.

“The architects we know are generally encapsulated in their agendas, in their narratives and in their own self-induced bubbles. They only contact their peers occasionally but otherwise they are hermetically sealed in their world. OODA has been the opposite from the beginning; we are like sponges absorbing knowledge. We have done our true education by not only working in our own office but also on multiple collaborations which has been instrumental to our practice.”