ABOUT
AFR ARCHITECTURE
“ If you invest in beauty, it will remain with you
all the days of your life ”
Frank Lloyd Wright
Descending from a studio founded over 50 years ago, AFR architects is an independent and privately owned company, staffed by a team of highly qualified professionals with a depth experience in the business of architecture and urban design, committed to provide added-value services to our clients.
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We are responsive and responsible to our clients trough the project’s life from concept to completion.
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We have built our practice on a distinctive way of thinking rather than a trademark style. Mindful of the shortcomings of many architectural "interventions," we approach a project as the occasion to put global experience in the service of local cultures and contexts.
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Technology meets passion and traditional methods of fabrication. The design of each unique project informs the next, building a knowledge base that helps to free us from conventional understandings.
By starting to study local history and culture, we enhance the richness of people lives by basing our designs on the analysis on the way people live, work and relax, as well on social and cultural environment
SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Architect, developer and businessman
ANTÓNIO FERNANDES RODRIGUES
Born in Lisbon, Portugal, António Fernandes Rodrigues studied naval engineering at the Technical University of Lisbon for two years and then went to Universidade Lusíada de Lisboa to obtain a master's degree in architecture.
Soon he discovered an interest in management, having undergone intensive training in this area.
Ex-surfer in love with the sea, his first business with a friend was a company called Nativas that produced pieces and accessories for windsurfing, in addition to beach clothes and, of course, his own designs of windsurf boards, thus testing
some theories of dynamics fluids from the naval engineering course.
He worked as an apprentice in his father's architecture studio since he was 16 and completed his first housing project while still a second-year architecture student. By this time, he started to dedicate himself more seriously to the family business,
having assumed the direction of the architecture studio a few years after graduation.
Early life
Born on January 25, 1959, Antonio Fernandes Rodrigues is the eldest of three brothers, sons of architects, father and mother.
At that time, the university of architecture was linked to training in Fine Arts, and António grew up in an artistic environment influenced not only by the work of his parents, but also by their friends, painters and sculptors.
Sport also marked his youth, as he practiced martial arts since he was 13, he has been practicing motocross racing since 14, surfing from 17.
To this day, he continues to practice sailing and windsurfing.
Professional career
Always showing a taste for business, he started at 16 as an apprentice in his father's architecture studio. As a student, he worked on a large number of hotel and tourism projects that went through the studio.
His first projects were built in 1987. After his father's retirement in 1998, he forms a new company, AFR Architects, which he still maintains today. The new company assumes strong skills in management and technology, which have proved to be
decisive in the success of major projects developed and under development, namely buildings of more than 200,000 square meters in the new riverside area
of Lisbon.