Hugo was born in 1972 in Paris from French mother and Portuguese father and had a formal French education until the age of 18. He has been living between Lisbon and Algarve and working mainly in Portugal. He had been studying and performing at the Hot Clube de Portugal jazz school band during two years when he started his studies in architecture in 1990 but says that it was from learning from the architect, painter, sculptor and former Team X member Pancho Guedes (1925-2015) that he understood what he really wanted out of architecture. He assisted Paulo-Guilherme d’Eça Leal (1932-2010) on some of the painter's/writer's/poet’s long-life research on geometry and architectural tracings, whose in turn inspired him to pursue his own research on an academic level. This research led to a PhD degree and an encouragement to apply it to a thesis contest by his friend and thesis tutor, Professor Luis Conceição (1952-2019). The thesis would go on to win an international academic prize in 2011 and later on published.

 

Since the 1990’s he has worked as a freelancer and in several architectural offices and urban planning firms and founded HNF Arquitectos Associados in 2013. To this day, he still maintains occasional collaboration with senior architect and urbanist João Cardoso Dias on major planning projects. 

 

Drawing was his first love, and he has been a compulsive sketcher and fan of “la ligne claire” (école de BD franco-belge) from a very young age. This passion has been keeping his conviction on the hand drawing process in the architectural design workflow as a fundamental tool, thus combining analog approach with digital technology - CAD/BIM/3D artwork - relying on the “human factor” as a medium to communicate ideas and architectural solutions and in the “learning curve” of each project.

 

He has been teaching at several universities and schools of architecture since 1998 and publishes his scientific research on architecture and urbanism on a regular basis. He often says that he had the privilege to be inspired since a very young age from his grand-uncle and private tutor, the former director of LNEC and world-wide seismologist Professor Júlio Ferry Borges (1922-1993), mostly on methodology, disciplinarity, humanistic and ethics. Lecturing architecture and urbanism in Morocco (2015-2019) was, up until now, his most enriching pedagogical and cultural experience. 

 

Hugo is also the older son of the Portuguese award-winning composer, cartoonist, writer and poet Nuno Nazareth Fernandes, which played a potential role in he himself being also a skilled musician, multi-instrumentist and composer who occasionally performs and records on musical projects. 

 

Sailing sports enthusiast, windsurfer since 13 years old, SUP and late-bloomer kitesurfer, Hugo has been passionate about the ocean and the Mediterranean, history, literature, Portuguese Philosophy, painting, cinema, guitars, heritage, cultures, traveling and everything related to water and global sustainable development goals (SDG’s). Federative Iberism, formally integrated in the EU and the UN, is his political conviction.

 

His preferred quote is from his older son: Never grow up. It’s a trap.