For Tiago do Vale, ceramics is rarely a decorative decision. It is, instead, a material of memory, one that helps connect a contemporary project to the place where it is born. At the studio he founded in 2012, after a path that passed through the University of Coimbra and other professional experiences, this idea runs consistently through his work: the material enters the project because it helps build continuity between a place, its history, and the life that will unfold there.
With Aleluia Ceramics, this relationship has already shown up in works of very different scales and geographies, from Braga, where the blue of the São Sebastião Guesthouse marks the façade of one of the city’s oldest streets, to Aveiro and Ponte de Lima. It was about this path, about the project he considers the most significant of his collaboration with Aleluia Ceramics, and about the role of ceramics in contemporary architecture, that we spoke.
A relationship that begins in a chapel
The first specification of Aleluia products by Tiago do Vale’s studio dates back to 2018, for a chapel whose construction should begin soon.
“We wanted to establish a cultural relationship with the Portuguese tradition of the azulejo in religious architecture, preserving some memory of the handmade piece, of the irregularity, of the vibration of light on the glaze,” the architect explains.
That search for memory became a guiding thread. “Ceramics is a material deeply rooted in Portuguese building culture. It’s not just a covering, it’s a way of protecting, of giving scale, of reflecting light, of building color, of introducing texture, and of establishing a very direct relationship between architecture and city.”
In the case of Aleluia Ceramics, the value lies in the balance between accessibility, technical consistency, and expressiveness, something he particularly recognizes in the Urban Atelier series. The collection visually approaches the handcrafted azulejo, while maintaining the cost and predictability that a contemporary project requires.
Braga, Aveiro, Ponte de Lima: three projects, one same attention to place
“They are different programs and different geographies, but they all share a concern with the relationship between the work and the place,” he says.
In Braga, the work took place on a street heavily charged with history, tied to the city’s Roman origins, and it is there that the blue façade of the São Sebastião Guesthouse takes on its symbolic weight, almost like a signal in the urban landscape. In the same building, besides the façade, the staircase is also fully clad in Urban Atelier.
In Aveiro, Casa de Sá enters into direct dialogue with the legacy of Art Nouveau. In Ponte de Lima, the Casa das Cerdeiras Hotel revisits the imagery of a Minho farmhouse made up of successive cycles of construction and reconstruction.
For Tiago do Vale, what unites these three projects, beyond ceramics, is an idea of fittingness.
“I don’t start from ceramics as image, nor from any material as image. The material has to belong to the problem,” he states. “I use ceramics as a material of belonging. Not to create a literal nostalgia, nor to imitate the past, but to allow the contemporary project to acknowledge the material culture that precedes it.”
The favorite project: the Cerdeiras kitchen
Asked which of these projects he most enjoyed developing, Tiago do Vale chooses the Casa das Cerdeiras Hotel without hesitation, though he explains that the reason isn’t the visual prominence of the ceramics.
“There it participates in a very interesting way in building an atmosphere,” he says.
The hotel’s kitchen is a contemporary space that nonetheless evokes the imagery of old kitchens, grocery stores, and rural houses where azulejo had a strong presence.
“It’s not about literally rebuilding a kitchen from the past, nor about creating nostalgic scenography. It’s about working with material signals that belong to our collective memory: the scale of the ceramic piece, the shine of the glaze, the rhythm of the grout lines, ease of cleaning, robustness, the relationship with water, with light, and with everyday use.”
The choice fell once again on the Urban Atelier series, for its ability to operate in the middle ground between industrial and handcrafted.
“It has industrial production, so it allows dimensional control, availability, affordable cost, and predictability on site, but it has an appearance that recalls the handmade azulejo.”
That slight vibration on the surface keeps the ceramic from looking too neutral. In a kitchen, the practical demands are obvious (resistance, hygiene, maintenance, durability), but the challenge, explains architect Tiago do Vale, was to design a space that didn’t look technical and generic, nor like a historicist reproduction.
“Ceramics allowed us to build that balance: a functional, contemporary space, but with a recognizable memory.”
The result has an almost affective density, a way of pointing back to a shared past in which materials were chosen because they worked, in their simplicity.
Fittingness above all
On the criteria that guide the choice of a material, Tiago do Vale rejects fixed hierarchies.
“Format and texture are decisive because they define scale. Color is decisive because it changes the atmosphere and how a space is read. Maintenance is decisive because architecture is continuous over time, in daily use, in cleaning, in wear, in repair. A good material is one that can respond to many problems at once.”
Nor does he see an opposition between technique and creativity. “Architecture always works with constraints: budget, regulations, structure, accessibility, labor, deadlines, maintenance. These constraints may look like limitations, but they are also generators of design.”
And when asked whether a space begins with the drawing or with the material, he answers that both come after a more essential first step: understanding the place, the program, the client, the history, and the expectations at stake. Only then does the drawing begin testing hypotheses, sometimes starting from a material, sometimes leading to it.
The role of materials in an architecture that runs out quickly
For Tiago do Vale, materials matter even more today because we live in a context where architecture is often reduced to the bare minimum.
“There’s a reactive impulse to provoke a different kind of experience, and materials have the potential to give architecture back its body, weight, temperature, sound, smell, texture, aging.”
At the Casa das Cerdeiras Hotel, this materiality is almost the narrative structure of the work: granite, schist, wood, hydraulic mosaic, marble, and ceramics help make legible the house’s different periods, between elements recovered, rebuilt, and reinterpreted.
In his reading, ceramics has a particular quality in working simultaneously with module, surface, shine, color, and texture.
“It can give a very precise scale to a wall or a floor. It can intensify light or soften it. It can introduce color in a very deep way, because glazed color is not the same as painted color.”
And in Portugal, Tiago do Vale points out, ceramics still carries a collective memory present in façades, kitchens, churches, and train stations.
“When we use it well, we’re not just covering a surface: we’re activating a material culture.”
Between image and lived experience
Asked whether today’s projects are designed more for the image than for lived experience, Tiago do Vale acknowledges the pressure that the fast circulation of photographs and renders puts on design. But he refuses to accept that architecture ends there.
“The real test of a building is the life it allows, the way it ages, how it is appropriated, how it responds to daily life and to change, and how it survives the passage of time.”
Among the trends he observes, he identifies a tension between a globalized architecture, dependent on references that circulate frictionlessly across geographies, and a strong return to rehabilitation, local materials, and human scale — and it is this second direction that interests him more.
As for the path ceramics will take in the coming years, Tiago do Vale bets on the continuity of what already makes it strong (durability, easy maintenance, resistance, color, texture, relationship with light), but with greater environmental awareness and more efficient production processes.
“I’m particularly interested in that path between industry and craft: products that are accessible and technically consistent, yet able to recover, in new ways, the depth and humanity of the handmade piece.”
A more exposed client, not always a more informed one
On the relationship with those who commission projects, Tiago do Vale notes that today’s client is certainly more exposed to images, products, and international references, which makes the conversation richer. But he draws an important distinction.
“Information is not necessarily understanding. An image can be seductive, but completely unsuited to a place, a budget, a way of life, or a building system.”
The studio’s response is to treat these references as a starting point for conversation, never as a final instruction, seeking the motivation behind the image in order to translate it into a suitable architectural solution.
A path built project by project
Before architecture, there was car design as a teenage reference, a synthesis of formal expression and technical precision that he would later rediscover in architecture itself.
After Coimbra and collaborations still as a student, the studio was born in 2012, and Chalé das Três Esquinas became an important moment, both for having housed the studio itself and for condensing themes that remain present in his work: rehabilitation, memory, construction, domesticity, light.
Tiago do Vale tries not to speak of closed-off influences, though he names Fernando Távora, for the honest and uncomplicated way he worked with history, Álvaro Siza, for the relationship between light, volume, and space, and João Mendes Ribeiro, for the almost artisanal precision of his drawing.
He also resists thinking of architecture in terms of styles, preferring an attitude of critical continuity that draws on both the Modern Movement and vernacular architecture, always with real attention to place and its constructive solutions.
Inspiration, he says, can be found in almost anything, as long as it is observed carefully, from an eroded stone to a piece of clockwork.
And if there’s one challenge that has shaped the way he designs, it’s resistance to certainty: “the first idea is rarely enough. I’ve learned to value doubt, revision, the ability to abandon solutions when the project demands it.”
Two principles that sum up the conversation
Asked about an essential principle in architecture, Tiago do Vale sums it up as “understand before designing.”
And on the most common mistake, he points in the opposite direction: “starting from the image or from the urge to do something different. If the project responds precisely to the place, the program, the people, and the time in which it’s built, it will end up finding its own identity.”
