Housing Building in Cascais by Atelier AAVV: A Contemporary Concrete Apartment Building Rooted in Place

Exploring the Language of a Contemporary Concrete Apartment Building

Designed by Atelier AAVV, the new housing building in Cascais stands as a sculptural, monolithic presence at the corner of a major avenue in this coastal Portuguese city. Realized in 2024, the 5000 m² residential project elevates the typology of apartment living through a poetic and robust architectural language. At once abstract and grounded, the structure embodies the principles of permanence, material clarity, and spatial depth, offering a modern response to the context of Cascais’ garden-city legacy.

Architecture as Structure, Structure as Form

The project begins with an act of courage — to create structure, to define space, and to bring meaning to form. On a site shaped by municipal planning constraints and programmatic requirements for varied housing types, the architects found freedom in the geometry of structure. The building’s formal clarity arises from this structural logic, carving out fifteen distinct apartments of one to four bedrooms, each with a unique relationship to light, space, and the surrounding landscape.

Responding to the City’s Urban Rhythm

Situated within the detached layout of Cascais' urban fabric, the apartment building plants a new architectural body into the site. In doing so, it asserts presence without aggression, framing a respectful dialogue with the city’s residential rhythm. The geometry of the plan and elevation breaks the expected repetition of mass housing and instead crafts a refined choreography of solids and voids. Each unit gains depth and privacy, while a distribution gallery transforms into a semi-public threshold that connects the interior life to the exterior world.

Material Simplicity, Poetic Texture

Concrete is the defining material of the project — pigmented and eroded to yield a tactile, weathered surface. It evokes both the material honesty of modernist architecture and a regional sensibility rooted in time and place. The building’s thick skin, formed by intentional erosion, recalls the natural resilience of coastal stone, embedding the project firmly within its landscape. Inside, the palette is understated yet expressive: plaster, terrazzo, stone, exposed and painted wood. These materials offer clarity and calm, while allowing space for individual expression to emerge with the inhabitants.

Light, Landscape, and Living Architecture

Terraces wrap around the structure, extending the domestic spaces into elevated gardens. These outdoor rooms are part of a larger ambition — to reintroduce the garden into the vertical city. Light is not simply allowed but carefully sculpted into the building, enhancing the sensual experience of each home and emphasizing its changing nature through time. The terraces offer panoramic connections to the sky and sea, making the building a vessel of contemplation and daily life.

A Legacy of Concrete Expression in Cascais

This contemporary concrete apartment building echoes the nearby modernist works of Ruy d’Athouguia while updating their spirit through a 21st-century lens. It reclaims concrete not only as a structural necessity but as a poetic medium capable of dialogue with history, context, and future occupants. The final result is not merely a block of apartments, but an inhabited form, open to interpretation and transformation.

Architecture That Awaits Life

Atelier AAVV’s design achieves an architectural depth that balances abstraction with embodiment. The building is not just a structure—it is a gesture of permanence, awaiting the slow passage of time, ready to house the lives that will shape its interior meanings. It is a home not just to individuals, but to the idea of housing as a dignified, durable, and spatially enriched experience.

All photographs are works of João Guimarães, João Peleteiro