The device that accompanies the logo of PROAP (as the logo shows itself – a streak of tree trunks arranged like a bar code) is clearly a kind of declaration of intentions that describes the poetry of the studio: PROAP is like one of these decoders of bar codes in supermarkets that, in the chaos of billions of different products, obtains to give all the technical information about the product in question (availability, stock, weight price,…).
The studio PROAP presents itself above all as a tool, as a machine for the reading and interpretation of the reality / landscape, capable to transmit all the ‘technical’ information about the landscape object.
The decoding is seen as the first step to the understanding / knowledge of the object of study, passing through the recognition and the decomposition of that same object, or of a phenomenon, in the elements that compose it, in order to understand how they interact with themselves or with the outside, how they function singularly or in a system and how the processes develop that keep it alive.
The first step is to visualize these elements and to make them emerge in order to understand them completely, to understand their logic and the way they work, to successfully re-interpret the processes, intervene in and from their interior and to construct a new mechanism.

The choice to describe the work of PROAP through keywords has to do with the kind of approach, more than it is an attempt to elaborate a sort of dictionary of the work of João Nunes and Carlos Ribas – despite the fact that in order to understand a different language, one has to study the words that compose that language.
The difference is that the inverse process (identification of the words / traces) leaves the question open or, permitting anything to have the possibility to create its own journey, alters the order and creates new meaningful associations, permitting anything to create its own language to recognize, finally, its own idea of the landscape.
This is the basic objective of PROAP, to direct energies, the vocation of a place, to intervene in the processes that create that same place, without superimpose or impose an image derived from signs that are not characteristic. There exists no mark in the projects of PROAP, however the projects itself mark parts of the land: there are acknowledged, existing individual traces in every project, all of them are characterized by elements that repeat, all of them are marked by lines that are more or less visible, more or less intense. Signs and indications bring the explanation of the landscape by PROAP to discovery, and basically to its idea of the landscape.

LIMITS
Banally, a limit is something that, in a drawing, can correspond to a line that divides two areas, but that can be transformed into a threshold, a unstable world dependent of a slope, water, expositions, materials, … of anything that can be determined by the designer, or that the project gesture (deliberate or not) can start, but that afterwards begins to live its own life in function of others parameters (climatic rhythm, geology and hydrology).
The limit shown on the plan transforms itself to the materialization of the line, quasi a being that lives in between two worlds in a continuous evolution, pulling the sense of what it has on its side, remaining in a constant dialogue (like an osmosis) to what only appears to be the limit, sensible to its pressures and open to (even the smallest) continuous alterations.
In the work of PROAP, the concept of the border presumes that this description is recognizable and travels through several scales: from the choice of bordering the area of the project with permeable elements, soon receptive and not exclusive in respect to the external reality (the hillocks of the Park Forlanini, the toad-hole of the Parque do Tejo e Trancão); over the rising of the uphill lines of the modeling of the terrain, that determine the existence of different conditions in both the slopes (the bumps of the Parque do Tejo e Trancão); to the demarcation of areas of implementing trees, where the interruption of the pavement is forming appropriate areas for the growth of vegetation (Garden of the Cordoaria, Alcântara).

RELATIONS
The identified elements never stand isolated; any of these elements is related with the existence of the others and towards the relations with the others.
“The park is made by the relations established between those elements that are newly constructed and by those that, kept intact, already existed. It is these relations that define the space and that produce the sensations that live in the same space. As a footprint, the mark of a body in the sand, it is not made of body neither of sand.
It barely exists as a shape, because a relationship is established between two, a meeting where the two are still recognizable, integrated and autonomous, but whose essence is different from it for any of them.

Relations between different elements:

SYSTEM
If the limits transform into a space between elements and become more than (de)limitation, then the relationships that are interposed between the various individual elements become interesting during the study period: the form to which the various elements relate to, but also the way these elements react to the introduction of other elements or other variables linked to the characteristics and the needs of the project intervention.
To project means to successfully insert in an assembly the elements that function within a system with other elements; new variables result from new successes, from new questions; thus resulting into a conjunction of elements that continue to function as a new system that could give an answer to the problems that made arise the necessities of a project.

DESIGN
In this sense, the current forms in the projects of PROAP are never only purely object related or arbitrary, design or graphical. The design never stands on its own, but is the instrument that allows presenting in a graphical way the system of relations that make the project; shapes and design both arise out of the problems that rose in the projects, out of the variable encounters in the site, being the resulting image of the interaction between all those elements.
For example, the shapes of the terrain of Alcântara have been risen because of the need to include and dissimulate the conducts of the arrangement of the subterranean car park, because of which the slopes with bigger pendant are constituted by immovable plates of weathering steel that permit to reach the conducts; the hillocks of the Forlanini Park rise as an answer to the need to find an element that, to give structure to the big central void (creating environments of fruition on a human scale), could – in a flexible way – pronounce the contact with the elements that existed before and thus creating zones with different ecological characteristics. The limps of the Parque do Tejo e Tranção raised because of the need to reuse the soil coming from the excavations of the adjacent residential buildings, and its geometry acts nowadays as a natural barrier against the strong winds, creating pleasant and protective reposing zones.

TOPOMORPHY
Hillocks, dunes, ground movements: changing the surface of a terrain creates the conditions to install new systems.
“The topomorphy is that what topography is describing during a representation system. (…) It works as a matrix of definitions of conditions of relations between the systems and the earth.”
That what in a design plan could look like a sculpturesque form, technically represented by a system of altimetric curves, is a complex system, where the passage of one line with another corresponds with different environmental conditions – exposure to the sun, irrigation, temperature influence, vegetation,… the shriveling of the terrestrial crust gives rise to a series of mechanisms that cause the installation of new systems that, interacting with the existing systems, have the capacity to answer to the problems that raised with the project. The line of the slumps of the Parque de Tejo e Tranção arises by the proximity of the two slopes that, having different slopes, determine diverse environmental conditions: the north-eastern slope, more inclined and bended and with difficult conditions of irrigation and insulation, creates a habitat ideal for bushes and spontaneous vegetation that contributes to diminish the effect of the wind, not encouraging to its fruition; the south-eastern slope, with a smoother pendant and manorial, is replanted with lawn, inviting to stay within the shelter for the wind.

Relations between various mechanisms:

PROCESSES
In Landscape Architecture, the relations between the various elements making a system and the various systems are never stable. Certain instability is inherent to the concept of relation, originating from the tension that establishes between the diverse elements and between the elements and what encircles them. The elements of a system, and the systems also, requested by reciprocal interactions and by the introduction of new parameters, work in continuous evolution, functioning like true mechanisms in movement. "To understand the processes is to observe them, interpret them and repeat them. To only possible image of its description is the process itself. It is with these processes and their participating elements that we work" *.

TIME
More than it is about instable systems, it’s about dynamical systems, open and receptive to the stimulations of the external world, therefore mutable in time (because being in the time), that, with the running of time, evolve in an organic way to build the image that becomes visible at that moment.
The project intervenes introducing - between the own parameters of the system - others parameters, others elements that, in tension with the parameters and the pre-existing elements, give rise to others systems, creating news mechanisms, initiating news processes. The landscape project can control the parameters that defined a form at a certain time, can manage the interactions between the several parameters, but cannot control the evolution of the image of that form.
"The process doesn't have to mean a resign from the form, but could do researches on the dynamic form, of its growth, its growing conjunct, its ripening, its sprouting, its death, its rebirth."**
For example: the vegetation on the north-eastern slopes of the slumps of the Parque do Tejo e Tranção is determined by the typical conditions of the slopes: also in the hypothesis of abandonment of the park maintenance, the control of the parameters introduced by the designer guarantee the continuity of the image and the functioning in the time.
"Even when a park is abandoned, the readability of its original drawing also should persist through the permanence of the processes that compose it." *

Relations between shapes and objects

PROGRAM AND PROJECT
"Any project theme presents itself, before anything, as a need to resolve concrete problems: problems of the operation of a system, of the compatibility between program and place, of recuperation and re-establishment of the operation of the individual mechanisms of a small site." *
The project, requested and justified by a determined program, is born out of the relation between the form that assumes (in the sense, again, of an image resulting from a complex of actions and answers to determined demands) and the objectives that, through that form, the project is going to achieve.
"The project is not so much the solution, the figure, the given endpoint, but more an environment to achieve a much broader result (in dimension) and more distant (in time) : the project of a process of formal fulfillment.” **
The more the project is going to control the parameters, the more the image of the project (the form) will correspond to those objectives; the more the project will be shown flexible to react to the introduction of new variables, the simpler the variations prompted by it pass the time.
The system of hillocks of the Forlanini Park is sufficiently open to allow it to be executed in phases, and is sufficiently flexible to be adapted in case of change of the pre-existing conditions.

CODEX
"The landscape is a text, an assembly of signs that translate the sense of the actions that produced it." *
The landscape architect reads, decodes, and interprets.
And he intervenes, between the processes with new elements, he combines the new second elements formulae, defuses new mechanisms, gives a start to new processes: intervening within the operation of a place, transforming it to his image, the conjunction of the signs that compose it.
He writes a new text, moved the key of the code.
He comes back to restart.

* João Nunes - the quotations are fragments taken out of classes, conferences and communication.

** Renato Bocchi - quotation out of a conference at the presentation of de exposition “PROAP. Progetti di Architettura del Paesaggio", Galleria AA, Milão, 4 Out. 2001.