Text by Antonio Angelillo, 2000

Emerging to an international level because of the design of the park of the EXPO' 98 of Lisbon, the Portuguese studio PROAP (studies and projects of landscape architecture), almost fifteen years after its foundation, represents nowadays a valid reality in the field of Landscape Architecture in Europe. It is unquestionable that the experience related to the achievement of the Park of the EXPO' 98, by its dimension and by the relevance that it assumed, have contributed to the notoriety of the studio; but at the same time it represented a determinant moment for the definition of the methodology of the project approaches and for the organization of the young professional structure.
PROAP has a multidisciplinary structure, composed by around thirty collaborators, consultants and partner, which have as a cultural reference the personality of João Nunes, one of the founding partners.
The design of this park of 90 hectares, that unfolds itself along some ‘important’ kilometres along the Tejo River, between the EXPO and the new bridge of Vasco Da Gama, relied upon the presence of some numerous environmental consultants during the competition phase (the project concerned the environmental rehabilitation of a former industrial zone), but also it relied upon project managers with an international reputation, amongst others the Californian George Hargreaves.

It needs to be stressed that the creation and growth of the studio PROAP concur with the emergency and the development of an environmental consciousness that, from the '80s, spread out in Europe and in the western world in general, requiring a bigger attention on behalf of politicians, of international agencies (UN, European Union, UNESCO) and of the local administrations related to the environmental issues, being translated into the structure of conservation programs and of project intervention in the territories.
The particularity of the European territory consists of the form of its human space, whose structure follows lines and appropriate modalities originating from centuries of urban and agricultural occupation, a cultural patrimony that should be protected and valuated since it gave rise, from an esthetical point of view, to the history of the western culture of the landscape.
With the new pressuring demands of the development of the European society that tend to put together economic growth (development of residential and industrial areas and of the respective infrastructures) and quality of the environment (guardianship of the local cultures, rehabilitation of inactivated environmental areas), there was no formal/professional systematic answer that had adequately faced the 'question' of the landscape project. Many are the disciplines that, under various titles, concentrate on the issue if territory, but in respect to the project of the landscape, it appears to be treated only in few upper courses in Europe and normally with a decisively traditional approach, not as a project culture connected to the contemporary space.
To growing search of technicians of the new sector gave rise to a vast phenomenon of re-qualification in the field of the Architecture, a profession that saw specifically the occasion to extend the limits of its own territory, entering in a perennial conflict with the traditional cultural formation that was mainly connected to the urban construction of the territory.

As others studios of Landscape Architecture in Europe, the particularity of PROAP (and the relatively novelty to the traditional professional structures) consists properly in the composition of their charts: PROAP is predominantly composed by people originating from the courses of the degree in Landscape Architecture. In Portugal the landscaping tradition has remote origins, but the foundation of the first degree in Landscape Architecture dates from the second half of the past century when, in the Upper Institute of Agronomy of the Technical University of Lisbon, a course was created that had to answer especially to the demands of productive maintenance of the land, more than to the importance of aesthetics.
As a matter of fact, the Portuguese territory is, in his biggest part, covered by delicate agricultural structures that are the result of orographic and particular hydrographical conditions with which they establish a strong landscape related relation: only think about the vine terraces in Douro and in Minho where the Porto Wine and the Green Wine are produced, or in the dams that, since the Roman epoch, guarantee the irrigation of the historical farms that mark all of the country.
From the faculty of Lisbon and, subsequently, of Évora, generations of landscape architects where formed that, in the public administrations, intervened in the normal practice of management and control of the territory, according to a multidisciplinary profile (topography, geology, ecology, natural sciences, botany, town planning) but with a clearly project minded perspective.

Indeed, the perturbed economical (and urban) development that was verified in Portugal from the end of the '80s, saw the conflict between the protection of the cultural and the landscape property to be emphasized (which made, above all, a history of productive agriculture to turn into a progressive phase of abandonment) and it saw the launching of modernity (with its shopping centres and its infrastructures) putting the Portuguese culture – notoriously 'environmental' (abroad it's been recognised that the environmental context should be considered as a determinant for the project) - to a dilemma (conservation / innovation).
The increasing use of land made it necessary to provide an adequate quality answer through the management of the complexity of urban projects that change the perception of Portuguese cities and, simultaneously, change the feeling of the rural area. Important Portuguese architecture studios that traditionally worked on large scale projects, opened up progressively the professional relationships with the landscape architect colleagues. PROAP turned into a privileged interlocutor of various important international studios, amongst them the studio of Gonçalo Byrne with whom a consulting contract was developed.

In this context, the success of the project along the Tejo, in such a prominent occasion as the organization of the last World Exposition of the millennium, had an exemplificative role: for the comprehension of the environmental factors that lacked answer, for the urban planning value in the heart of a process of big amplitude rehabilitation, for the identity of a public space integrated in an esthetical contemporary culture.
These factors distinguished the project Nunes / Hargreaves from the other proposals presented at the competition of 1994 and, in general, distinguished it from a traditional perspective of the design of the landscape, as it is dominant in the Portuguese field of landscape architecture, like it is in the rest of Europe. The restoration of the attention for the urban quality, in its complexity, is certainly a conquest for the urban politicians of the European cities. The Architecture was capable to offer adequate answers in terms of theories, researches, models and achievements for the reconfiguration of urban spaces (it is sufficient to cite the cases of Barcelona, Berlin and Paris). However, still little was done in respect to the intermediate spaces (the ones that are not sufficiently urban and that are not rural anymore) whose identity frequently is trusted to the translation of traditional models (the public garden with flowerbeds) or to an outdated (but adequate to the current culture of mass consumption) recuperation of the local/traditional rural atmosphere.

In these private spaces of identity, residues of the explosion of the diffuse city (a phenomenon that currently concerns all of Europe), it is necessary to act with a disenchanted vision that accepts the conditions of the place and that, despite of its hybrid character, bring to it the elements that will designate to its transformation. For João Nunes, the reading of the place follows a process that's needed and determined in reading the rules (of the geological events and of the material culture) that have defined the codes of the aesthetics of a landscape. Once the landscaping project and its realisation represent a further occurrence about the territory (this time aesthetically deliberate), it is evident that such a process requires a deep capacity of synthesis between the methodology of analysis (of the morphological aspects) and the inevitably connected tension to the instability of the concept of public within the contemporary society. It is a concept in continuous evolution. Therefore, the exercise of comprehension and of restitution of the identity of the place is simultaneously an artistic and cultural fact once a certain esthetical sensibility is required in the comprehension of the phenomena that used to define and that will define (after the project) its character.
This anxiety that the work of João Nunes transmit, approaches the anxiety of other artistic sensitivities (e.g. painters, photographers) that search for the identity of places and that represent the contribution that studio PROAP offers to the international debate of Architecture about the contemporary European landscape.