Narrating Proap’s extensive work, through 18 built works and 9 projects is a hard, but interesting and revealing task. Given the considerable number of built works and projects carried out over the last 20 years, the criteria employed in this election were extensive. On one hand, we wanted to present the latest and most emblematic projects and, on the other hand, we wanted to reveal different scales and interventions types, however, undoubtedly, what we most arduously endeavoured, in this publication, was to narrate and illustrate a story; the story of each project and each intervention.
Over the past 20 years João Nunes, and the PROAP team, have dedicated themselves to an almost obsessive search of a way to dialogue, to understand and to communicate with landscape in an perceptive and involved manner. They have tried to understand and reflect each landscape and each site to subsequently conceive a design which is coherent with its meaning. The result of this reflection is a monographic issue that, far from being an extensive vision, tries to present the characteristics of PROAP’s architecture. The portrayed projects are urban gardens and parks, fluvial parks, urban quarters, however, rather than being organized according typology, they try to correspond to a history, an evolution, a more intense and more concrete understanding of landscape and its characteristics.
One of the concepts that better defines the architecture of this group of architects is their approach to the main design, given it becomes the most important process of creation. The essence of each project and each intervention is withhold in the design that defines the transformation of nature where each landscape is transformed by the feelings and sensations of each place; “We do not intend to engrave an image on the ground, we do intend to understand the site’s characteristics, the energies that determine its functioning, placing the desire to transform into the flow defined by these energies themselves.”
For landscape architecture devotees, this book is a visual stroll through the projects and intentions of this group of architects, followed by drawings, plans, texts and quality photography.
Bárbara Silva