PROMONTORIO: Architecture and the Reflective Practice

The book brings together key works of the practice founded in Lisbon in 1990 by Paulo Martins Barata, João Luís Ferreira, Paulo Perloiro, Pedro Appleton and João Perloiro, which started as an experimental practice, and consistently grown into a multidisciplinary team of more than 60 architects, planners, landscape architects, interior designers and graphic designers.

The idea of a reflective practice, as advanced in the early 1980s by philosopher and MIT professor of education and urban studies Donald Schön, summons the ability to critically and ethically reflect on its own actions, while engaging in a process of continuous adaptation and learning. Perceived as a kind of ‘practicing school’ for various generations in Portugal, the PROMONTORIO has evolved, in both theory and practice, inspired by the idea that deliberate reflection on experience is essential in order to cultivate a developmental insight into architecture.

This publication deals with projects that the partnership has developed over the past three decades, and which together constitute an impressive body of work in various places spanning Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the USA, and ranging from city planning, to culture and educational, heritage and conservation, commercial and mixed-use programmes, in addition to hospitality and leisure. Published by Hatje Cantz and edited by Gerrit Confurius, it includes contributions from Ana Vaz Milheiro, André Tavares, Diogo Seixas Lopes, Kenneth Frampton, Nuno Cera, Rafaël Magrou and Yehuda E. Safran.