João Machado: Poética Visual

50 years of graphic work · 1974–2024

Fifty years of João Machado’s graphic work, brought together across an entire floor of MUDE, Museu do Design, in Lisbon.

Role: Equipment design
Year: 2025
Disciplines: Exhibition design, Equipment design, Spatial design, 3D modelling, CAD, Motion, Production, Installation

The exhibition’s title wall: João Machado’s portrait in cut colour across a blue fabric panel between two concrete columns

João Machado’s posters are saturated and visually loud. MUDE is raw concrete and exposed services. The exhibition architecture had to give the work presence without competing with it.

The answer was to work with the building. A slightly elastic fabric stretches between the existing columns to make a lightweight architecture inside the open hall. Backlit, it carries the titles, the texts and the reproductions, and defines rooms without touching the structure.

The double-height hall at MUDE, with concrete columns and exposed services above the exhibition — Raw concrete and the column grid the exhibition is organised around. Photograph © Luísa Ferreira

Axonometric render of the full exhibition floor, showing the route through the column grid — 3D render of the full floor, seen from above

A long white wall of João Machado posters running down the gallery, a visitor walking past in motion blur — Fifty years of it, along one wall. Photograph © Luísa Ferreira

My role, equipment design

My first large-scale exhibition, followed from development through production and installation. Within the equipment team I was responsible for the physical solutions the exhibition needed: site measurements, 3D modelling, CAD, technical development, production and problem solving on site. That is less about producing drawings than about knowing how each thing gets fabricated, how it meets a building that is not quite square, and what to do when the material disagrees with the model.

Fabric tension system

The idea was simple: stretch slightly elastic fabric between the existing columns. Making it stable, repeatable and visually precise took considerably longer.

What follows is the system in the order it had to be solved: the straightforward case first, then the ones the exhibition itself demanded.

Axonometric of one fabric panel spanning between two concrete columns, with the steel tube inside the sewn edge of the fabric and ratchet straps pulling the tube to the column

Fig. 01Ratchet straps on one side

The panel wraps one column and is tensioned against the next. Its edges are sewn into sleeves and steel tubes slide through them, so the tubes become part of the assembly without ever being fixed to the textile. Ratchet straps connect those tubes to the far column, and tightening them pulls the panel into tension until it stands up on its own.

A steel tube being threaded through the sewn sleeve along the edge of the fabric — The tube threaded through the sewn sleeve, and the strap pulling it to the column

Ratchet straps holding the steel tube against a concrete column — The tube threaded through the sewn sleeve, and the strap pulling it to the column

Axonometric of two fabric panels meeting at one column, their ratchet straps offset along the tubes so each panel can be tensioned on its own

Fig. 02Ratchet straps on both sides

Where two panels meet the same column they stop being two structures. Six tensioners hold the pair against each other and the assembly stays permanently in tension: neither panel stands without the other. The fittings sit off-centre on each panel and the neighbouring panel is mirrored about the horizontal axis, so where one sits high the other sits low and the two never overlap on the shared column. Every panel still finishes at the same height.

Axonometric of the worst case: several fabric panels arriving at one column from different directions, with a vertical tube on either side of it and ratchet straps stacked at three heights

Fig. 03Straps stacked at three heights

The worst case is a column taking panels from several directions at once. A vertical tube runs down either side of it and the straps stack at three heights, so no two tensioners pull on the same line.

What you see is restrained. Getting there meant holding textile, steel, tension and a building that is not quite square in agreement at the same time.

And then the corner

The hardest case was not structural. In one place the graphics had to turn a corner and carry on, so that a single continuous surface came round and took artwork across both faces instead of stopping at the column.

The standard arrangement could not do it. That corner got a different strap arrangement and one additional profile, which let the fabric make an L and hold tension in both directions at once.

Fig. 04An added profile at the corner

The fabric wraps the added profile and carries on, so the artwork turns the corner with it. The straps run from that profile, around the adjacent column and back, and that is what tensions the corner: each leg of the L is pulled taut by the other.

The corner panel built: one continuous blue surface turning around a concrete column, carrying the exhibition title across both faces — The L, built. One surface round the column, graphics carrying across both faces. Photographs © Luísa Ferreira

The same corner panel seen from the lobby through the glass doors of the gallery — The L, built. One surface round the column, graphics carrying across both faces. Photographs © Luísa Ferreira

Set-up animation

Interactive screen supports

The exhibition also carried interactive screens throughout. I developed supports using adjustable structural props and steel clamps, so each screen could be positioned and levelled to its own location. Lightweight, adaptable, and requiring no permanent intervention in the museum.

An interactive touchscreen on its support within the exhibition — A screen on its prop, levelled to its own position. Photograph © Luísa Ferreira

What the drawings could not predict

The 3D and CAD studies were there to understand the system, not to simulate the fabric. Once it was up, some sections creased in ways that had not shown during development: a large elastic surface only tells you what it is going to do under real tension, in the actual building.

The fix was made on site: extra tension points, weights and clips connected to the ceiling structure, tuning individual sections until the surface came right.

A weight hanging from a clip at the edge of a fabric panel, adding tension — Extra tension points added on site: a weight at the panel edge, and a clip to the ceiling structure

A clip connecting a tension line to the exposed ceiling structure — Extra tension points added on site: a weight at the panel edge, and a clip to the ceiling structure

Equipment design is not designing an object or producing a technically correct drawing. It is making something that survives contact with materials, tolerances, architecture, production and people. Following one project through all of that, from the first measurement to the last adjustment, was the useful part.

Visitors moving through the finished exhibition between backlit fabric panels — Photographs © Luísa Ferreira

Two visitors talking in front of the red Designer como Artista panel, seen from the corridor through the glass — Photographs © Luísa Ferreira

Credits

Exhibition design and museography by United By. Exhibition photography by Luísa Ferreira. Installation photographs are my own.