Porto Atelier
A cannery that became forty-one homes
Location
Alcântara, Lisbon
Typology
Adaptive Reuse
Status
Completed
Completion
2025
The greenest building is the one already standing. Everything else is an argument about how much of it you are willing to keep.
A 1927 sardine cannery converted to forty-one apartments and a public workshop, retaining 91% of the original structure.
Project data
- Typology
- Adaptive reuse — residential
- Original building
- Fábrica Sousa, 1927
- Structure retained
- 91% by mass
- Apartments
- 41
- Gross area
- 8,700 m²
- Embodied carbon avoided
- 4,180 tCO₂e
- Public workshop
- Open 4 days weekly
- Completed
- July 2025
- Coordinates
- 38.7040° N, 9.1770° W
Ninety-eight years of concrete
The Fábrica Sousa cannery closed in 1974 and had been derelict for most of the time since. Two structural surveys recommended demolition. A third, which we commissioned, established that the frame was sound and the failure was entirely in the roof and the infill.
We kept the frame, the floor slabs, the two chimneys and the north sawtooth glazing. We removed the roof, the brick infill and a 1960s extension that was never part of the original.
Insert, don't replace
Forty-one apartments are inserted into the existing structural grid as freestanding timber boxes, touching the concrete only where they must. None of the new construction is load-bearing on the old frame.
The consequence is legible everywhere: you can always see where 1927 ends and 2025 begins. Nothing new pretends to be old, and nothing old was cleaned up to look new.
The ground stays industrial
The full ground floor remains a working space — a shared workshop with the original travelling crane still on its rails and still certified for use. It is open to the neighbourhood four days a week.
The crane was not kept for atmosphere. It lifts things, which is what the residents upstairs use it for.
Retaining ninety-one per cent of a structure is not a heritage decision. It is the single largest carbon decision available to a developer.
— Yusuf Adeyemi, Director of Sustainability
The building as a study model, not a render.
Every scheme begins as stacked volumes on the studio table. This is that model, rebuilt — it turns with the page, and it shows the argument of the building rather than a marketing image of it.
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06 frames
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