Casal Santa Luzia
Lisbon, Portugal
Housing
25.509 m2
2026
In Arroios, Lisbon, Casal de Santa Luzia occupies a fragmented urban site between Rua Dona Estefânia, Rua da Escola de Medicina Veterinária, and a new street extending from Alexandre Braga. The surrounding fabric is made up of buildings of different scales, while the nearby Liceu de Camões, designed by Ventura Terra, adds a more specific architectural presence to the area. The proposal uses the new development to complete this part of the block, establishing a clearer relationship between the existing buildings, the new street, and the public green space at its western edge.
The allotment is divided into five entrances, allowing the volumes to respond to different conditions while maintaining a continuous urban presence. At the corner of Rua Dona Estefânia, the first volume closes an existing party wall and sets the height for the other residential sections. The new street provides a more pedestrian character to the interior of the block, and the building’s ground floor is designed to participate in this condition rather than separate the street from the homes above.
This makes the ground floor an important part of the project. Most of its frontage is glazed, bringing shops and services directly into contact with the street, allowing the public realm to extend into the building. Above them, the character changes as the programme becomes exclusively residential. Landscape completes the organisation of the block. The ground is kept as permeable as possible, with planted areas and a shared garden introduced around the volumes. Changes to the terrain improve the conditions of the ground-floor apartments and protect the privacy of homes above.
The façades follow the same transition between the public and domestic scales. A regular concrete structure provides a continuous framework, while secondary columns and opaque panels are distributed according to the orientation and use of each space. Bedrooms and other more private rooms have a denser façade, providing a filter to the street, while living areas open onto the street through larger glazed surfaces. Balconies and recessed areas give the façade depth and create a gradual relationship between the apartments and the city.
The constraints of the site also shaped the building’s structural logic. Limited floor-to-floor heights required the project to be developed from the maximum façade heights downwards, with particular attention given to keeping the floor slabs as thin as possible. The resulting grid of reinforced-concrete columns therefore serves two purposes, improving structural efficiency while contributing to privacy and the composition of the elevations.
Status
Ongoing, Private
Client
Santo SGPS
Design team
Diogo Sousa Rocha
Duarte Ramalho Fontes
João Prisco
Marta Vaz
Marta Meirinhos de Castro
Mafalda Cotrim
Patricia Moreira
Filipa Rodrigues
Carlos Guilherme Pinto
Tânia Marques
Raul Cruz
Rita Pinho
Rita Bastos Serra
Consultants
BARBAR
Oh!Land Studio
ASL & Associados
