She got here through ten years designing hotels at Vasco & Lima, before leaving in 2016 and turning toward existing buildings that had stopped doing their original job. She does not treat those ten years as wasted. They gave her the judgement for work like this: reading a building that is already there, and asking what else it can become.

Cinema Belomonte is a hundred-and-ten-seat storefront cinema on Rua do Belomonte, reopened from 2017 by Teresa Sá, Nuno Barbosa, Aisha Baldé, Rui Marques and Maya. It had closed in 1987 and then sat shuttered for thirty years. So this was not Maya’s project alone. She was one of five people who brought it back into use.

She is working on a written opinion for the Piscina de Matosinhos, a municipal pool from 1966 that has been closed since 2018 after a roof failure. The council has not asked her for a design. It has asked whether the pool can be saved, and roughly what that would take. She has been in the building eleven times and has not written the opinion yet.

The library is the old Escola Primária da Bouça, a 1958 primary school reopened in October 2023 after a conversion costing four hundred and ten thousand euros. It had four classrooms round a corridor, then closed in 2014 because there were not enough children in the parish. The reading room is now used much more for study than for borrowing: from four in the afternoon, it fills with teenagers.

Maya Ferreira is a fifty-one-year-old architect in Porto who works with buildings that already exist and have stopped doing what they were built for. She trained in Lisbon, and her work is to ask whether a building like that can take on another use, instead of treating it as finished.

This was the Estoril seafront hotel, built from 2009 to 2012, with a hundred and forty rooms. It was the first project Maya Ferreira ran as project architect. She stepped the building down the slope in four terraced sections, so no room looked into another room’s terrace. That section is the decision she is still proudest of.

At Estoril, she got the drainage wrong, and it cost the contractor four weeks. In the site meeting, Maya Ferreira stood up and said it was hers. She tells it plainly, without dressing it up as a lesson.

Inês Cardoso taught her detailing, and Duarte Lima taught her by giving her responsibility before she was ready. Cardoso was the senior technician who made Maya redraw one balcony junction for four months, until it was right. She never explained what was wrong, only that it was wrong. Maya is grateful for that. She says she learned more from it than from six years of school. Duarte Lima, one of the principals, gave her the Estoril job at thirty-one, too early, and that became the largest move anyone made for her career.

After Estoril came Hotel Aurora in Vila Nova de Gaia, from 2013 to 2016: the conversion of a nineteenth-century port wine lodge. The client wanted the original granite kept for its character and the structure could not use it, so it was cut back and hung on steel as a facing. That is the wall in front of you.

The wall is original granite, but it is no longer doing the work of a wall. The stone was cut back, hung on steel, and returned as a facing because the client wanted its character kept. For Maya Ferreira, that made it a real wall turned into a picture of itself. She argued for six months that the building should say what it was, and she lost.

She left after an Algarve project cut the accessible rooms from twelve to four, and put the money into a spa. That was February 2016, in a value-engineering meeting. She raised it in writing two days later, was told it was a commercial decision, and resigned three months after that. Maya does not say she left over one meeting. She says it was when she noticed she had stopped arguing.

She said nothing because she had already decided, wrongly or not, that she could not carry that room. For six months she had been losing the argument about the granite. In that meeting she looked round, judged it unwinnable, and let it pass. She minds that. She also says the arithmetic was probably right, but a correct calculation is not the same as a reason.

It comes from a value-engineering meeting in the Algarve, in February 2016, where the accessible rooms went from twelve to four to pay for a spa — and nobody in the room thought that unusual. Since then she treats accessibility as decided at the same moment as the structure, or decided against. It is not a line item.

Her first big job was the Estoril seafront hotel, a hundred and forty rooms, from 2009 to 2012. She ran it as project architect at thirty-one, after Duarte Lima gave her the job when she was not ready for it. It is where she found out she could do it, and it is still work she is proud of.

The cinema is leased by Associação Cinema Belomonte, a non-profit of about ninety members. The building still belongs to a family in Matosinhos, but in 2018 they gave the association a twenty-five-year peppercorn lease. The reopening came from five people: Teresa Sá, Nuno Barbosa, Aisha Baldé, Rui Marques and Maya.

That is Teresa Sá, the projectionist here from 1971 until the cinema closed. She kept the Ernemann projector in her son’s garage, wrapped in blankets. She also remembered where the switchgear was, and which seats were original. Much of what could be restored in this room depended on what she knew. She died in 2023.

The money came from Nuno Barbosa’s fundraising next door at the bakery: thirty-one thousand euros in fourteen months, mostly in gifts under fifty. He kept the ledger in a school exercise book, and that book is now framed in the foyer. It was not the whole cost of reopening, but it was the decisive money that let a building with no money move forward.

They disagreed about the floor, and it went on for two months. Teresa wanted the raked floor restored, because that is what a cinema is. Nuno wanted it flat, so the room could hold meetings and parties. It got genuinely bad. In the end they made a demountable platform, which six people can strike in about three hours. Neither of them got what they wanted, and both defend it now.

Maya did the drawings, the licensing and the fire strategy here, unpaid, and came most Saturdays for fourteen months. She kept herself off the association’s board, deliberately. For her, the person who drew it should not be the person who signs it off.

It opened on 26 April 2019, four months late, with sixty-eight people in the room. They showed Verdes Anos. Teresa had last projected that film there in 1974, and on this night she introduced it while the screening ran on a digital projector. The old Ernemann was there in the foyer, but not in use.

The opening was four months late because Maya insisted on building the accessible WC before any of the seats were fixed down. It cost about nine thousand euros they did not have, and it was unpopular. Nuno told her in front of everyone that she would close them before they opened. Later, in public, he said she had been right.

The old Ernemann needs a rebuild and a licence before it can run. On opening night it stood in the foyer, a kind of witness, while a digital projector showed the film.

It runs Thursday to Sunday, with about twenty volunteers on the rota. It nearly closed in 2021, when the rota fell to five, but it found its way back after Aisha gave the Tuesday slot to a Cape Verdean film club that had nowhere to meet. Nine new volunteers came in within two months.

Aisha Baldé chose the first season. She was a film student then, and she programmed 1970s Portuguese cinema against contemporary West African film. The opening film was Verdes Anos, which Teresa had last projected in that room in 1974.

The room had been shut since 1987: a hundred-and-ten-seat storefront cinema on Rua do Belomonte that sat shuttered for thirty years. It came back piece by piece. Rui Marques, an electrician, rewired the whole building across eleven Saturdays and would not be paid.

Maya kept the building because the 1958 structure was sound, and at that budget a new replacement would have been worse. Demolition was seriously considered; two of the five councillors preferred it. But the brief was a library for four hundred and ten thousand euros over eight hundred square metres, which left very little room for waste. The neighbourhood also already knew where the building was. Her argument was practical, not sentimental.

The mezzanine would have taken the daylight out of the room below. Each classroom was 3.4 metres high, with clerestory windows set high in the wall. A new floor would have sat just under them. Maya refused it, though it would have roughly doubled the shelving and the parish wanted it. Instead she offered shelving up to 2.4 metres, with rolling ladders, giving about sixty per cent of that capacity. The council accepted, with one member recorded against.

In month three, they found asbestos in the roof felt. That meant sixty thousand euros and four months, and it swallowed the whole contingency, plus part of the furniture budget. That is the direct reason the chairs later mattered so much.

It became a reading room, and it opened in October 2023. From four in the afternoon it fills with teenagers — it is used far more as a study space than as a lending library, which is not what the brief ordered.

It is being used more than projected, but not in the way the parish first counted. Lending is about a third of the projection, and the council was disappointed at first. But from four in the afternoon, the reading room fills with teenagers. Maya’s position is that the building is working as a library, just not mainly as a lending machine.

The chairs are mismatched because they were second-hand school chairs, brought from another closed school in Valongo after the asbestos in the roof swallowed the furniture budget. Maya says they became the single best-loved thing in the building: a constraint that made the room feel better, not worse.

The ramp is at the front because Maya Ferreira would not make wheelchair users enter through a secondary door. The original entrance had seven steps. The cheaper answer was a ramp round the side, but she rebuilt the entrance terrace instead, on the main elevation. That cost about twenty-eight thousand euros more than the side-ramp option. For her, access is decided with the structure, not added later as a line item.

These rooms were a primary school: four classrooms around a corridor, built in 1958 and closed in 2014 when there were not enough children in the parish. It then sat empty for six years. At the opening, a teacher who had worked here for nineteen years told Maya the corridor still smelled the same. Maya says that was the only review she wanted.

She does not know yet whether the pool can be saved, and the honest answer may be no. The roof is a thin-shell concrete vault, failing at a haunch where water has been reaching the reinforcement since at least 2014. She says the rest of the shell decides everything, and that means opening it up in three places. The council has not agreed to spend about eleven thousand euros on that. So she will not write, “it can be saved, if.” She has seen that turn into a press release.

On the eleventh visit, she is photographing the same six points again, the day after a storm. She has been here in dry weeks, rain, and one storm because the staining under the vault tells her where the water is really getting in, not simply where the hole is.

She has been asked twice to take a partner, and she said no twice, but she is not certain either no was right. Sofia Vinhas asked in 2023; Maya said no because she did not want to be responsible for somebody else’s mortgage. Duarte Lima asked in 2024; she said no because she is not sure she has forgiven him, and she says that is probably unfair to him.

Maya Ferreira does not want a larger practice, because for her, the value-engineering meeting is exactly what appears once a practice gets big enough to have one. In the Algarve in February 2016, she sat in a meeting where the accessible rooms went from twelve to four, and the money went into a spa. Nobody in the room thought that was unusual. That is the kind of room she has chosen not to build a working life around.

Maya decides by asking six questions in the first fortnight, and by saying no early to work she is not right for. She looks at what the structure is really doing, what is worth keeping, where the daylight comes from, what the neighbourhood already uses, who maintains it later, and what the cheapest honest answer is, even if that answer is demolition. She also does not take on new-build private houses.

Maya works alone from one room above a tile shop in Porto, usually with two or three projects on the table at once. That scale is a choice. It keeps the practice small enough for her to follow each building closely. The buildings she takes on already exist, and have stopped doing what they were built for. Her work is to find out whether they can do something else.

What you just tried
is the lightweight version.

You don’t need a finished
portfolio to begin.

One system.
Three ways to put a person’s work in reach.

Voice

Intelligent imagery

Guided scenes

Imagine it as your own practice.

Maya Ferreira, architect in Porto — a Living Portrait

What you just triedis the lightweight version.