Quinta do Malheiro - Casa Cordeiro - architect António Vicente de Castro - 1955

In 1955 he built a house in Portimão at Quinta do Malheiro, Casa Cordeiro, for the client Jaime Dias Cordeiro. This project, completely integratedinto the urban fabric of the city on a wide avenue, consists of a single-family house, spread over three floors (basement , ground floor and first floor), with a roof terrace. The program consists of: a basement with storage room and garage; a ground floor with communal and service areas, living and dining room, kitchen and utility room with access to the outside and sanitary facilities. On the top floor 4 bedrooms with a bathroom. The roof terrace has a canope (shade roof) as an open concrete pergola (see photo), resting on concrete columns and a set of V-shaped metal pillars.

​Vicente de Castro tried to create some dynamism in the facade, through protruding and receding surfaces, linked to the interior spaces and the use of “box balconies” popular in international modernism. Of the external sun protection elements, the concrete pergolas - which define the outdoor areas of the entrance and the roof - are particularly striking. The facades were given color by cladding some of the walls on the outside with tiles in natural tones.

“This theory of balconies, which we can perhaps trace back to post-war Latin American and Brazilian architecture, normally contains - in its search for forms of climate and thermal control in collective housing, within the 'LeCorbusian' influence - three types of elements :

* 1. The veranda itself, protruding approximately 1 meter from the facade, protected by a masonry parapet consisting of a grid of modulated industrial blocks, which conceal or shade part of the terraced space.

* 2. 'loose beams', horizontal, in concrete, which function as a 'sunshade' or 'brise-soleil' in the upper part of the span, and also as a modulation line for the geometry of each balcony box.

* 3. Vicente de Castro uses the features of 'free forms' typical of the design of the time, for example by drawing irregular curved surfaces and voids in false ceilings of building atriums, or marking the facades of buildings through indentations, using color.