Ricardo Leitão, guest lecturer at FAUP and researcher at CEAU, and Rita Furtado, both former students of FAUP, unanimously won the first edition of the Manuel Graça Dias Award, dst-Ordem of Architects, First Work, with the "House in Freamunde".

The jury for the first edition of this award, chaired by Sergio Fernandez and which included the architects Sofia Isidoro (appointed by the Ministry of Culture), Ana Vaz Milheiro (appointed by the Portuguese Section of the International Association of Art Critics) and Inês Vieira da Silva and Egas José Vieira (both appointed by the Board of the Order of Architects) registered 31 applications that were evaluated according to the affirmation of the importance, value, and message to be conveyed with this first edition of the Award, emphasizing that it is an evocation of Manuel Graça Dias' first works and that the conditions of "architectural quality, inventiveness, and environmental considerations" are associated with it.

The "House in Freamunde" (2021) is a "small two-story house designed for a young family in Freamunde, occupying a trapezoidal plot flanked by two dwellings of current language and construction". In the project's descriptive memory, the authors refer to the house's double character: "On the one hand, it tries to design a façade for the street in the Albertian sense of the term, i.e., openly public and to a certain extent autonomous in relation to the interior (...) trying to achieve, at the same time, a certain abstraction and banality in the choice, design and composition of its elements. In the back, the house is three-dimensional. On the pretext of some pre-existing spurious constructions, it was possible, at each end, to advance over the patio and the expectant gables, forming a small open patio of domestic scale that patiently awaits the green growth of the ivy. This operation results in a tripartite volume, punctuated by spans that at times dematerialize the corners and at others perforate the walls, enlivening the apparent symmetry of the whole, which underlies the classical matrix of the project.

For the Jury, the house "'is not and could not be pure', translating an intelligent and sensitive work base", reinforcing that "it is from this concept, with an attitude where creativity is intimately linked to rigor and to the sense of what the living space can and should be, that this work originates, we would say without recourse to any kind of easy exhibitionism, but of great architectural value".

The Jury also decided to award a first honorable mention to the second work with the most votes, referring to the application "Casa-Atelier", authored by the architect Maria João Rebelo, former student of FAUP, and the architect João Paupério, PhD student of FAUP and researcher at CEAU-FAUP. It is a renovation where the confrontation between the new and the pre-existing is done with plastic and spatial resources that fully justify the evocation of the manifesto "Il fera beau demain" by Lacaton & Vassal (1995).

The Jury also decided to award an honorable mention to two works ex aequo, one to the application "General Silveira Building", by architects Tiago Antero and Vítor Fernandes - "emphasizing the security and inventiveness put into solving the complex problem of access and, as well as, the intention to enhance formal values characteristic of the site of intervention" -, and to the application "House with Many Faces" by the architect Ana Luísa Soares, student of the PhD Program in Architecture at FAUP - "which deserved special attention for being an experience plastically very characterized and that, simultaneously, questions, by the type of program proposed, the adoption of stereotyped solutions".

The Manuel Graça Dias dst - Ordem dos Arquitectos, First Work Award, with institutional support from FAUP, is intended to recognize and celebrate the quality of the architecture produced by recently graduated architects, as a way to encourage professional practice, in the sense of inventiveness, environmental considerations, good-practices, within the framework of information, awareness and education measures, of the National Policy of Architecture and Landscape.

By inscribing his name on the Prize, this initiative aims to celebrate Manuel Graça Dias, a unique figure of Portuguese architecture in the many dimensions he developed, as a professional, critic, editor, disseminator, among others. By associating his name with a "first work" award, we intend to underline the imagination, non-conformism, availability and generosity that Manuel Graça Dias always demonstrated.

Manuel Graça Dias (1953-2019) was a member of the FAUP faculty since 1997, where he was responsible for the General Theory of Organization and Space.

The awarding of the MGD, dst-Ordem of Architects, 1st work takes place on April 11 in a small ceremony beginning at 17h30. On this date Manuel Graça Dias would celebrate his birthday.

Teatro Lu.Ca - Luís de Camões, in Lisbon, was chosen because it is one of the last works, in the case of rehabilitation, of the duo "Contemporânea" - MGD + Egas José Vieira, completed and inaugurated in 2018.