Fragmentos was born in Lisbon in 1994 as the shared project of four architects —Duarte Pinto-Coelho, Marcus Cerdeira, Miguel Martins Santos and Pedro Silva Lopes—, determined to understand architecture as a way of reading the relationship between built space and the life that inhabits it. It has since grown into a studio of more than sixty collaborators —architects, engineers, interior designers and communication specialists— today led by eight partners, who join the founders with Fernando Flora, Maria do Rosário Jacinto, João Paulo Branco and David Ferreira.

Fragmentos’ work spans single-family houses, multi-family residential buildings and urban planning, always through cross-disciplinary teams that bring together architecture, engineering and interior design. This way of working —collaborative, attentive to the strength of its relationships with both private clients and public institutions— sustains an idea of sustainability understood as a balance between the people who will inhabit each project and the pace of a technical progress the studio embraces without being carried away by it.

This vocation is recognised with particular clarity in its residential architecture along the Portuguese coast —Comporta, Melides, Tróia, Cascais—, where the project submits to the landscape rather than to the architect’s will: topography, vegetation and light shape volumes, materials and circulation until the boundary between house and surroundings dissolves. It is, in the studio’s own words, an architecture conceived to “provide a sense of belonging and wellbeing” to those who inhabit it.

Fragmentos’ work has been featured in outlets such as Archdaily, Design Boom, Divisare and Architizer. In 2020 it received Portugal’s National Award for Urban Rehabilitation (Prémio Nacional de Reabilitação Urbana) for the restoration of the Palácio da Anunciada.