In this candid interview, architects Rui Leão and Carlotta Bruni of LBA Macau discuss their latest book Layering the City (Actar Publishers, 2025), a compelling synthesis of their architectural practice and research across the dense, contested territory of Macau. Rather than propose utopias, their work addresses real constraints—public space erasure, heritage degradation, and tourism pressure—by building micro-resistances into the city fabric. They speak to the power of architectural section, shared open space, and negotiation with institutions to embed collective life into housing, infrastructure, and historic urban centers. Layering, for them, is both method and metaphor: of overlapping agendas, scalar shifts, and temporal depth in a city at the limits of development.
