During my course i had the opportunity to collaborate with various architects, almost all former teachers. From this experience, not only to participate in ongoing projects arising from their professional and project-oriented activity and therefore a contribution to my current exercise as an architect. Still, the calls for tenders among others, kept lit creative act, preventing a certain conformism that happens sometimes with the completion of the course.

These experiences were no outstanding questions for my year as a teacher taking me so to start an academic career where the current presence and systematic of my students and trainees , maintaining continuous ambition to evolve , to meditate , to criticize, to equate all the time the I do and therefore what I intend to architecture I produce . At the same time contribute to greater and ever evolving professional performance of new architects and future colleagues , now students , whom I considerand I dedicate these words.

These past experiences , I recall with nostalgia the friend and architect Humberto Vieira , then teacher who visits the Bouro Monastery, Refoios , Relationship Chain and numerous others, not only provided me direct contact with some of my references as Eduardo Souto Moura, Álvaro Siza or Fernando Távora as , no doubt , have been and continue to be a reference to what I am as an architect and as a teacher by way of being and teach , to see and understand the architecture and the teaching of it.

Still early in the course the presence of José Paulo dos Santos as a teacher provided the contact with national and international architects during the school term , which served as a reference during the academic life and throughout my career as a professional today. The all teachers without distinction, now some colleagues , considering the passion that left me by the architecture and teaching ..

The trip during the course eastward and Italy among other destinations, accompanied by teachers who soon became friends as José Manuel Pedreirinho, made the weight of history and world architecture across the board always related to cultures, local, the people, a constant presence and a current desire to know, traveling, look for references and roots in the history and architecture of the past and confront what I do with what I see, serving this analysis to a more critical ability of my personal performance. Today as a teacher exalt the history, the past and those references and travel in my classes and I see the passion that was transmitted me is being passed on to other generations.

Once you have completed the course and have worked with several architects soon I began to describe my own path.

In parallel to my exercise as I started teaching in 1991, I had the privilege of having many former students and trainees who participated at various times in my office on many different projects, to which I dedicate these words and thank you for your precious collaboration. It would be impossible to mention here all the names that marked the beginning of the route by which all of them I greet and thank.

The multidisciplinary team working with several colleagues from other areas such as design and marketing has secured a process of learning and continuous development of knowledge. The professional practice on scales such as design, interior study, image, brands and concepts that current demand is the example in our case led to the formation of a multidisciplinary team in various offices and laboring at the moment in several countries and locations.

Even as a teacher, I describe a route, (I confess less ambitious ever felt), where the teaching brand, whether my performance as a professional forcing a constantly evolving and maturing of my knowledge, as it fills me deeply and enriched me with the experience of deal in terms of human relationships with others who speak the same language, having the possibility to contribute to the training of young architects. The teaching of architecture, in addition to their scientific aim is in my view the most important in the formation of new values - pedagogical. Personal values, personal and ethical but fundamentally the back to basics and first object of "doing architecture" which I understand to be: to read; able to understand; learn propose; know-how architecture with the truth of its materials, its logic and in the end ... if possible ... contribute to a better, more beautiful, drawing it with the aesthetic inspiration that each add me ...

Nuno Oliveira, Architect