On October 20 at 18:30, the Auditório do Museu at Fundação de Serralves will host the presentation of Some Kind of Romance, Any Kind of Existence, the new monograph on OODA published by Hatje Cantz. Otiima is proud to support this event, which brings together some of the most influential voices in contemporary Portuguese architecture to mark fifteen years of the Porto-founded studio’s practice.
The book resists the conventions of the architectural monograph. It is structured as a bifurcated narrative with two mirrored halves in dialogue. One half follows the studio’s engagement in Albania, where urban regeneration and identity reconstruction unfold amid rapid change. The other turns to Portugal, tracing how OODA treats time, heritage, and landscape as active materials in both rehabilitation and new construction. Together, the two sections speak less about buildings and more about a way of inhabiting the world, presenting architecture as chronicle.
Following the presentation, a conversation will bring together four of the book’s contributing authors — Manuel Aires Mateus, João Luís Carrilho da Graça, Nuno Melo Sousa, and Eduardo Souto de Moura — alongside OODA itself. The discussion will have the same openness as the texts: an exchange about ways of seeing and making architecture, not a formal panel on completed projects.
Edited by OODA, with editorial direction by Diogo Brito and project coordination by Marina Rodrigues, the English edition of the volume runs 476 pages. It was designed by The Royal Studio and published by Hatje Cantz in June 2026.
OODA’s decision to frame fifteen years of built work through narrative and correspondence rather than drawings and data alone reflects a conviction we share: architecture is ultimately about how people inhabit space, and technical decisions only matter if they serve that experience. The same logic shapes how we think about our window and framing systems as infrastructure serving the life around them, not as objects to be noticed for their own sake.
Access to the event is free, subject to registration.
