ARX

The Music School and headquarters of the Cascais and Oeiras Chamber Orchestra occupies the former Pensão Boaventura building, located in the lower part of Monte Estoril, in the municipality of Cascais. It is an original early-20th-century construction built as a single-family home and known as "Chalet Madalena". The house occupies almost the entire centre of the plot, which was later extended to the south through the acquisition of the adjoining parcel of land, occupied only by a magnificent century-old palm grove.

It was decided to preserve the existing house and its relationship with the site, not so much for the significance of its architectural qualities, which are modest, but because it represents a typology characteristic of the Estoril area, one that has consistently been demolished and replaced by large-scale buildings that fill their plots entirely, eliminating gardens and blocking visual permeability.

The interior of the house was completely rebuilt, respecting the cruciform spatial layout of the original house, adapted to present-day needs. The rooms of the new programme, generally small in size, are for the most part designed for individual and small-group music teaching. This characteristic of the programme also required an appropriate response to demanding acoustic constraints.

The new multipurpose hall, of larger dimensions and intended for orchestral rehearsals and performances, was built as a simple extension of the original house's stone base towards the palm grove. Its geometry combines a response to the visual conditions of the surroundings, framing the setting in an intense relationship with the garden, with the need to meet the hall's special acoustic requirements and to allow a new access road to the car park to run along the edge of the plot.

Its roof is now an outdoor leisure terrace, a natural extension of the interior of the old chalet and a link to the garden.