Fala Atelier

Fala Atelier is an architecture practice based in Porto and Lausanne, founded in 2013 and led by Filipe Magalhães, Ana Luísa Soares, Ahmed Belkhodja and Lera Samovich, together with Ana Lima, João Carlos Lopes and João Baptista. The atelier works under a two-word programme it calls methodic optimism.

Since its foundation fala has produced more than two hundred projects and competition proposals, with nearly seventy works built, moving between private houses and compact urban blocks. Project 179, a striped block of five family apartments, was bought by SRU Porto and became the practice’s first completed public housing; Ugly Ducks gathers a decade of research into Porto’s overlooked architectural language. The partners teach at Yale, HEAD Genève and ENSA Paris-Est, and since 2026 fala is Chief Curator of Architecture at MAC/CCB in Lisbon.