Open Design for Unplanned Narratives Fala Atelier’s Oneiric Realms and Post-Digital Representation

Abstract

FALA Atelier, based in Lisbon, Portugal, has established itself over the past decade as a leading practice exploring the relationship between post-digital visual languages and design in architecture. Under the leadership of Filipe Magalhães, Ana Luisa Soares, and Ahmed Belkhodja, the studio’s work, documented in international monographs including 2G, uses collage and photomontage techniques to generate dreamlike representations of domestic space that resist conventional realism. While FALA’s aesthetic and representational strategies have been widely discussed, this paper focuses on a less examined aspect of their work: the social and spatial openness inherent in their unbuilt competition proposals.

Through critical analysis of three residential competition projects (n.172, n.46, and n.191), this research investigates how FALA’s approach to design and drawing constructs unplanned interior scenarios, spaces that resist prescriptive planning and invite unanticipated patterns of use and occupation. These projects, marked by flexible layouts, ambiguous zoning, and narrative-driven collages, suggest open-ended possibilities for domestic life. Their visual strategies frame interiors not as static backdrops for predefined activities but as speculative environments for emergent social behaviours and collective inhabitation.

By examining FALA’s unpublished competition drawings through the lens of open design and unplanned interior life, this paper connects post-digital representational methods with broader spatial practices that foreground adaptability, temporality, and user agency. FALA’s work thus contributes to current architectural discourse on how interiors can accommodate, and even encourage, the shifting moral geographies, social dynamics, and unanticipated domestic configurations of contemporary life.