When the University of Lisbon‘s architecture faculty set out to celebrate its 22 years of providing design education, MUDE – the Lisbon Design and Fashion Museum – signed on to host a spectucular retrospective. Designed by Mário Matos Ribeiro (founder of Lisbon Fashion Week and a professor and lecturer at the university) and architect Marco Rocha, and on until March 23, the MUDE exhibition displays concepts and works by students going back to 1992, the design school’s inaugural year.

The items on display cover everything from graphic design and industrial products to fashion, with curator-in charge Ribeiro capturing 22 years of multidisciplinary creativity.

Located on the über-industrial second floor of MUDE, situated in Lisbon’s historic downtown site of Pombaline Baixa, the exhibition is brimming with such motifs as suit lining, glowing suspended spheres and plastic-pallet plinths. Above one such display area, a massive rectangular chandelier is lined in fabric fringes. Elsewhere, tailored frocks and rough-hewn furniture are shown inside geometric pinewood cages lifted above the floor, as if levitating above the illuminated plinths.

“The set design is materialized by these deconstructed arguments,” says Rocha, “conceptualizing a space design in which the spectator sees the constructive process, from the prototypes to the final objects.”

The interdisciplinary selection also speaks directly to Rocha, an architect-designer-art director with a number of set designs, retail and hospitality projects and branding and fashion campaigns on the go. “An architect must have the versatility to conjugate several areas, allowing him to be a mediator and creator of new language for the interaction between multiple teams and disciplines. Fashion in this context assumes a role of contextual and social influence, trend and visual language.”