EDP Sede II (Energia de Portugal Headquarters)
EDP Sede II is an office building in Lisbon, Portugal, completed in 2024. It was designed by the Chilean firm ELEMENTAL, led by Pritzker Prize winner Alejandro Aravena, in collaboration with Portuguese architect João Luís Carrilho da Graça, and forms the second stage of EDP’s riverfront campus on the Tagus.
A master plan required the public space to run unbroken from Lisbon’s hills down to the river, splitting the building into two linear volumes; yet the offices needed to function as a single entity. ELEMENTAL resolved this by folding the ground into a slight slope that preserves this continuity, connecting the two volumes beneath its highest point. The raised, folded ground doubles as a public plaza, with a long reinforced-concrete cantilever projecting towards the river.
Aravena worked with the weight and thermal mass of raw concrete, Brutalist in the original sense of béton brut, a material language also seen in his Innovation Center UC in Santiago. A deep structural grid on the outer façades shades the glass behind it from Lisbon’s sun, giving the building its characteristic depth and heavy shadow.
The two blocks accommodate around 800 employees across 23,800 m² of gross floor area.
