Each of the Matos Ribeiro semis spilt into two elements forming a courtyard. The various floor platforms are interconnected by ramps and cantilevered steps which tear into the staircase spaces The external balustrades and the gates show early evidence of my lengthy fascination with Art Nouveau The drawings of a side facade indicate the various phases through which the design passed. These drawings are a reflection of the section through the circulation area of the house.

The Saipal Bakery was the headquarters and factory of the Lourenço Marques Baker's Co-operative They called themselves Saipal o pao da Cidade - The Bread of the City. The building was designed around the machinery layouts supplied by the German manufacturers of the ovens and other equipment. Unfortunately the machines did not know how to make Portuguese bread and refused to be adjusted to do so. The bakers fought amongst themselves and Saipal soon fell apart. In its early days Saipal had a powerful symbolic charge - the bakers loved it and explained often how marvellous it was that I had made their building in the shape of a huge Portuguese bread. All the bread cupboards in their various depots throughout the city had superimposed cutouts of the elevation in wood riding the top shelf. I had not been thinking of a Portuguese bread loaf. The section has been generated out of two parabolic arches worked on over and over again together with an engineer, so that the arches would only need very little reinforcement and theoretically none. The best part of Saipal is the lateral courtyard which resulted from the provision for future expansions of the factory area for Saipal to make biscuits when it was not making bread. The intersection of the arches and pillars resulting from a careful analysis of the loads became monumental personages seeming to step away from the rest of the building transfixed by a shaft of emptiness where neutral zone is. The recent Red Model of three bays of Saipal where the partial section turns into the full section exaggerates the idea of the building. It is a better and more perfect building than the temporary bakery and it is also an instant ruin. It is the son of Saipal built 25 years after the first Idea, and it makes it clear why I dismissed any sort of chronology long ago.

The Leite Martins house on its narrow and very long site is a house of platforms around a narrow courtyard. The original sketches which Judge Leite Martins enthusiastically approved are more flamboyant and Gaudianesque than the drawings for the house as built. I still remember wandering through the completed house entirely empty, and filled with a great brightness from all the large areas of glass which were nevertheless sheltered from direct sunlight by the huge overhangs. Early photographs show the house when it was brand new with its huge light fittings made out of sheet iron. The house was soon invaded by vegetation which grew through holes in the roof provided for just that. Downstairs, at the back, two bedrooms shelter an enormous veranda below them which the Judge furnished like a room whose walls had vanished. It was much of a surrealist setting.

The aged drawing is by my son, Pedro, when he was a little boy of about five or six. He saw me drawing the Smiling Lion and he said: "Dada" you are not doing it right, this is how you must to it", and he gave me the little drawing. The drawing has been extremely influential for me. I have been painting interpretations of it ever since. The drawing is really an idea for a much looser kind of building.