André Caiado was born in Lisbon in 1967 and trained as an architect at the Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, graduating in 1990. From Lisbon he moved to Madrid, to the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura, where he completed a master’s degree in Computing for Architecture, Urban Planning and Real Estate Management and, in 1995, defended his doctoral thesis on Intelligent Building Technologies with the highest distinction — cum laude. During those years he worked in parallel as an architect at IBM and Telefónica, a dual experience that shaped from the outset his understanding of the discipline: as a practice that integrates technical knowledge, constructive intelligence and the strategic dimension of the project.
Back in Lisbon, he led the Environment and Architecture departments at Novodesign and taught at various universities for more than two decades. In 1996 he founded Contacto Atlântico in Estoril. What began as an architecture studio has grown, over thirty years, into a multidisciplinary firm with dozens of specialists covering every field linked to the construction project: architecture, engineering, urban planning, interior design, landscape architecture and architectural visualisation.
Contacto Atlântico has built a diverse body of work, with projects for national and international clients. Among its most recognised references are the Diário de Notícias building — awarded on several occasions — and the intervention in the Quarteirão do Rossio, within Lisbon’s built heritage.
Beyond professional practice, André Caiado takes an active part in disciplinary debate at a global scale: he lectures on architecture across different countries and advises the European Commission as an expert in the evaluation of urban energy efficiency projects under the FP7 and Horizon 2020 programmes. He has also served on the executive board of BUILT CoLAB, the Portuguese platform for R&D and digitalisation in the construction sector.
Three decades of work have established at Contacto Atlântico a studio culture that combines technical rigour, project management capacity and attentiveness to place. An architecture that cannot be understood apart from its context — geographical, climatic, heritage — and that finds in the intelligence of the constructive process its most distinctive form of expression.