João Paulo Branco collaborates with Fragmentos for 12 years. In 2019, he becomes a partner and Fragmentos officially establishes an Engineering Department. Today, this Department has two partners, João Paulo Branco and David Ferreira, who, together with Duarte Pinto-Coelho, Marcus Cerdeira, Miguel Martins Santos, and Pedro Silva Lopes, form the studio's management. See the full biography here.
With only five years since the department's creation, Engineering already has more than a dozen collaborators. How do you feel about this growth?
In five years, the development of the Engineering Department has shown resilience in the face of national and international circumstances while investing in the company's growth through new hires. Today, we are a team that excels at finding the technical solutions that best fit each client's profile so that at the end of each project, the story can be told differently. For the client, this partnership is absolutely essential because of the way projects can be developed synchronously and objectively. For the architecture and engineering teams, this connection raises the development of projects to a higher level of rigor and quality, resulting in benefits at all levels.
Today, unlike five years ago, you are no longer the sole Engineering partner. The partnership with David Ferreira seems to come almost naturally. Tell us a bit about this complementarity.
To the benefit of our department, hiring David Ferreira added tremendous quality and knowledge. In developing our projects, both in his area (Mechanical Engineering) and in other areas, David brought essential knowledge for the complementarity and compatibility between specialties. His influence grew significantly, leading to a shared desire to create conditions for team growth, which quickly expanded from five people to 13. David's performance was evident from the beginning. Three years after joining us, he was appointed Associate, and two years later, he was proposed as Partner, recognizing what he represents for this project. Fragmentos is much stronger with the complementarity of David and João Paulo!
Engineering plays a crucial role in adopting solutions to meet today's challenges. The last two years have seen significant investment in sustainability. Can you share a bit about what has been done?
At Fragmentos, Sustainability is a constant concern, and I believe the decision to add an autonomous Engineering team to the Architecture team has impacted this prioritization. The team was formed from the beginning with the concern for developing sustainable projects, and this connection between areas soon brought sustainability issues to the forefront, with the involvement of promoters and effective gains at all levels (in project, construction, and energy performance). This is a path with no return, incorporating and expanding the list of companies promoting green business development and clearly assuming our responsibility in reducing the negative impacts inherent to our practice and positively influencing our increasingly aware clients.
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