Admittedly poetic and metaphysical, Diogo would certainly like to take the place of the librarian at the endless and inexhaustive library of Jorge Luis Borges, looking for the book that contains the message capable of decoding and unravelling the spiral of possibilities of reality, essential in the technologies of current information and communication. He could easily feature in the short story, The Library of Babel (1944) or in the film The Name of the Rose (1986), universes of volumes and volumes of certainties and uncertainties revealing the greatest and best knowledge but where simultaneously, a line or page is the manifestation and decoding of a detail.

Creative, assertive and with a stubborn unique perseverance focused on the objectives and purposes. He believes that ambition and dedication are related to quality and work capacity. Always impatient, he nurtures the experimental approach in OODA. He believes in doing and doing better, accumulating experiences aimed at the future sustainability and essentiality of architecture. From OODA’s work to date, he selects D. Manuel II, Miramar Tower, Douro Hotel & Winery and Matadouro. OODA’s businessman, empathetic with promoters, investors, and employees for his communication skills, he is creative and emotional.

Diogo travels through writing from which he feeds himself with an additional and special devotion for screenplays and stories for film. For this reason, he likes places that stimulate him and triggers his imagination like London or New York but also Azores. From the readings of his life he highlights Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, the Artist’s Reality by Mark Rothko and The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. From the films he chooses Star Wars, The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Interstellar, Good Will Hunting, Clockwork Orange and the Seinfeld sitcom. For music, Pearl Jam, Pink Floyd, Bon Iver, and the soundtrack composers Hans Zimmer, Ramin Djawadi and Ólafur Arnalds. With regard to art, the main influences are Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko, Henri Matisse, Luigi Ghirri and Donald Judd. His life heroes are Steve Jobs, George Lucas, Ayrton Senna, Rafael Nadal and Miguel Esteves Cardoso.

“Architecture is thinking. Architecture should never be generic and replicated, but rather specific and adequate.”

He admires Swiss and Portuguese architecture especially and respectively the work of Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron and Eduardo Souto de Moura. He was the commissioner of Outside Job – Reporting Design Process Overseas – a set of lectures held at Casa das Artes in 2016 in Porto which focused on how and what architects with international experience operate within the field of architecture and design. Subsequently, he was the author and editor of ToolBook, published worldwide in 2019, a practical book about the practice of architecture in the everyday life of architects which specifically covers the methodology and operational side of offices such as Foster + Partners, Steven Holl, Bjarke Ingels, Kengo Kuma, Fernando Romero and Eduardo Souto de Moura.

He founded OODA with Rodrigo Vilas-Boas and together they wrote the OODA Business Plan in late 2009, a book based on their European experiences that served as a launching statement of the office but also a blueprint for the future. Diogo worked for Promontório in Lisbon between 2006 and 2007 and then with Zaha Hadid Architects in London between 2007 and 2009. Born in Porto in 1983, he graduated in Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture and Arts of Universidade Lusíada do Porto in 2006. He wants to explore Australia, drive across the USA, discover Machu Picchu and understand Auschwitz.

Diogo on Press