José Castro Caldas (b. April 29, 1981)
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This website serves as a record of my path, with architecture as its guiding thread, though it has led me to explore other fields and interests such as travel and cinema. I graduated in Architecture from the Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa in 2007, during a period marked by economic crisis, which influenced the beginning of my professional trajectory. I worked for about three years in Portugal before moving to Argentina with the Inov-Art Grant in 2010.
In Buenos Aires, I collaborated with the studio Adamo Faiden and with the NGO Un Techo para mi País, dedicated to interventions in peripheral neighbourhoods through field surveys and the construction of emergency housing. This experience set the tone for the next collaboration, in the Brazilian Amazon, with the Fundação Amazónia Sustentável (FAS), where I lived and worked within the sustainable development communities along the Rio Negro.
Back in Lisbon, I began a line of work exploring the intersection between architecture and carpentry — testing the possibility of the architect executing their own work. I developed projects in which I designed and built pieces and spaces, from a table to a house, seeking to understand the role of the constructive gesture within architectural practice. At the same time, I re-engaged with the school, where for nearly ten years I was part of the team responsible for in situ – Laboratórios de Arquitectura, an experimental programme of the Department of Architecture at the Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa dedicated to research through practice and to the relationship between construction, teaching and territory.
I currently work as an architect — without the direct execution — which allows for other scales and forms of approach. I also conduct research within the PhD in Architecture at the Department of Architecture of the Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa, where I study the role of architecture in the construction of Mozambique’s independence, through the thesis “When Utopias Were Possible — José Forjaz and the Building of Independent Mozambique.”
Throughout this path, the need to travel has remained constant — long journeys through the Middle East, Central America, South America and Southeast Asia, and shorter displacements that gradually compose a map I try to draw without repetition, as there is (always) so much left to see. There have also been a few ventures into film, with three works: Rutz, made during a journey; O que fica, marking ten editions of in situ; and Lá vem o dia, a short film shot in my Casa | Estúdio | Oficina.
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Main milestones:
– 2024: Began a PhD in Contemporary Architecture at the Department of Architecture, UAL.
– 2020: Started working independently as an architect.
– 2015-2020: Collaborated with the FURO office.
– 2016: Tutor for the in situ 5 laboratory, in collaboration with Gonçalo Pacheco and Sérgio Silva.
– 2013: Returned to Portugal after travels through South America and Southeast Asia, including sustainability projects and the film “RUTZ – Global Generation Travel“.
– 2011-2013: Projects at the Rio Negro Sustainable Development Reserve, supported by the Amazonas Sustainable Foundation.
– 2010-2011: Collaborated with the NGO “Un Techo para mi País” and with Adamo-Faiden studio in Buenos Aires (Inov-Art Scholarship).
– 2007: Graduated in Architecture from the Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa.
josecastrocaldas@gmail.com
+351 914290433
