'Just Another Fake' – Montemor-o-Novo Studio by Ai Weiwei

I was invited to an exhibition in Portugal. I had never been there before—I didn’t even know exactly where Portugal was. At that time, I had already decided to start looking for a way to get a permanent residence permit. I always need visas and residence status to travel. In Portugal, there’s a rule that you automatically get a residence permit if you make an investment, so I invested. They offered a plot of land with a residential building, and I said “fine.” That was it. I didn’t even compare it to other locations and didn’t exactly know where it was. We drove there during the hot summer, stopped, they said, “this is the place,” and I said, “okay.” 

They showed me the place. I didn’t calculate, I didn’t compare—I wasn’t trying to make the best possible choice. That’s not how I work. I take what comes, and I love solving problems. I don’t avoid them. Every problem has a solution, and I do my best to create something out of it.

I started with a little planning, just thinking about how the studio would relate to the rest of the space. But honestly, I already had a clear idea of how it should be. It’s not that complicated. The landscaping is really simple. It’s a bit like furnishing a room—you just think about where things should go. Some things belong in the corner, some things go in the bathroom. It’s very straightforward, really just common sense.

It is a summary of all my studies on Chinese craftmanship and its inherent understanding of how fabricated elements relate to nature in wooden constructions. But the idea came from solving a problem that I created, as I always need to do. The natural choice here was to rethink the studio in Malu, near Shanghai, that was destroyed by the authorities in 2011. I wanted to redesign it, but with a completely different approach. Here in Montemor-o-Novo, I’ve used a wooden structure inspired by furniture making. It’s the same in some ways, but entirely different in others. In Malu, the building was a reinforced concrete structure with brick infill and many different rooms.

It’s a conceptual method. 

That’s a good question. I asked about the maximum span of the wood, which was six meters. The height could also be five to six meters, so that’s one unit. I need three units to get the right size. In total, that gives me 18 by 18 meters, which works out to 54 by 54 meters for the overall structure. I didn’t want to make it bigger or smaller because I needed a courtyard in the middle. If the structure were too small, a courtyard wouldn’t be possible. 

In principle, yes, but of course, you could find larger pieces of wood.

Yes, exactly—100 points for the concrete foundations for the columns. There’s a cement floor, and local stone for the flooring. The round bases of the columns are made from locally sourced stone that is machine-cut and very smooth. We also used local Douglas pine wood, local bricks and local tiles. The only reason for using all the local materials was that it was cost-effective.

It’s a completely open space, with a courtyard in the center. It works best when nothing is placed in it because the void itself is the building. The surrounding volume and the structure are meant to serve a functional purpose. It’s considered a single-story building, but in one area I incorporated a second level. The reason for this is to get closer to the ceiling. Otherwise, you’d have the same distance to the ceiling everywhere. For me, it’s about the human experience within the building—scale and proportion are key.

Let me be precise: this building uses the vocabulary of Chinese furniture. The wooden joints are assembled without a single nail, and the joints are not visible. The big difference to a traditional building is that it is built with regular columns on which the roof is placed rotated by 30 degrees. This completely disrupts the alignment of the connection between the columns and the roof structure and makes the whole thing very irregular.

I don’t really care, but they like it. It just takes more time, which means they earn more money.

I don’t have to train them. Everything is done with the computer; the workers train themselves, much like ChatGPT. I provided clear architectural drawings, and we met to discuss every detail. That was a challenge because they only know how to operate the machines. No one knows how to do it by hand—everyone relies on machines, and I really hate that.

Dragon? That’s only because when you shift the direction of the roof, it naturally develops in that way. You can’t change it because the ridges and everything follow that direction. It’s very interesting—one simple move, and everything changes. It’s not my design; it’s just logic. Logic is far more powerful than design.  

First and foremost, it’s a private building. Everyone asks me what it’s going to be used for—whether it will be a museum or a foundation. I tell them it will be empty. They respond with “what are you talking about? So much time, money and effort have gone into it.” For me, the quality of the volume and the building itself is what matters most. It’s interesting because most buildings are designed for a specific use. In my building, the use is the building itself, its structural concept. That is the use.

It’s a space with potential for everything. You could ride a bike there, do modern dance, host charity events, or whatever else. I’m not going to use it.

An architect helped me, a local woman. She made the drawings and dealt with the authorities. I called it a warehouse. Because it’s an agricultural area, you can’t build a museum or a gallery or anything like that. They asked me what I planned to put in there, and I told them sunflower seeds. They didn’t realize that the sunflower seeds were made of ceramic. Just another fake.