All Events
Manuel Aires Mateus Headshot
View Slideshow
Close
Previous
Next
Manuel Aires Mateus Headshot
White interior of building wit two sets of stairs
Room with glass wall and pitched roof
Series of doorways through brick walls
White rectangular building with angled cut out of windows through facade
Wooden structure with circular entrance in grassy field
Human figure pulling large white curtain closed in white room
Concrete building with circular cut out at roofline
White structure with triangular cutout at base
Arial view of white building with shallow pool on roof

The Cunningham Lecture: Manuel Aires Mateus

Beauty Despite All
Wednesday, April 1, 2026
6:30 pm

Plaza Gallery, Meyerson Hall, 210 S. 34th St., Philadelphia, PA

Free and open to the public
Presented By
Series
The Cunningham Lecture

About

The Department of Architecture welcomes Manuel Aires Mateus for his lecture, "Beauty Despite All." Manuel will talk about the exhibition currently on display at Serralves in Porto, Portugal and the projects in progress at the studio.

Manuel Aires Mateus was born in Lisbon in 1963. He graduated from Faculdade de Arquitetura de Lisboa in 1986, having founded the studio Aires Mateus in 1988 with his brother Francisco Aires Mateus. He has worked with several universities since 1986, such as the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Oslo Architecture School and the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Ljubljana, among others. Since 1998, he teaches at the Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa and, since 2001, at the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio, Switzerland.

Aires Mateus has participated in several Venice Architecture Biennales and they were also present at the Architecture Biennale Villa et Culture in Rabat (Morocco, 2018), at Milan Design Week (2017) and at the Chicago Architecture Biennial. They were recently at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (2021) with the project TO INHABIT. The studio has also been awarded several national and international prizes, including the AIT Award, Valmor Prize, Secil Prize, FAD Awards, Ecola Prize, ENOR Prize as well as the prize of the Ibero-American Urban Planning and Architecture Biennale (2001, 2012, 2019) and the selection for the Mies van der Rohe Prize. In 2017, Manuel Aires Mateus was awarded with the Pessoa Prize.

The studio has always dealt with the role of memory and knowledge, with the relationship between the physical and the cultural world. The work seeks to reflect on every scale surrounding us. It searches for the perennial state of shapes and materiality in the continuity of time.

If you require any accessibility accommodation, such as live captioning, audio description, or a sign language interpreter, please email news@design.upenn.edu. Please note, we require at least five (5) business days’ notice.