Date: 1997/2000

Location: Funchal, Madeira, Portugal

Area: 20.000 sqm

Client: Câmara Municipal do Funchal

Classification: 1st Prize

Project Coordinators:
João Ferreira Nunes, Carlos Ribas.

Project Collaborators:
Nuno Jacinto, Teresa Marta, Patrícia Ramalho, Sandra Ferreira, Cristina Vasconcelos.

Other Collaborators:
Luiz Moreira, Jorge Bastos, Lacerda Moreira.

Photography:
Leonardo Finotti

We believe that Cities are drawn, that their forms are defined, through a game of tensions between spaces with different meanings, a weft of attractions and barriers from which finally results a drawing, like the footprints of a long fight or a long dance which would have taken place on the ground.

This analogy is almost a common place when one refers to Streets, Squares, Peripheries, Vacant Spaces and Built Spaces, but when one thinks of gardens, which can be assumed either as vacant built spaces or as built spaces, the established depend of the project options for each space, of the established relations as consequence of those options tensions in the periphery generated between those spaces and its immediate context. Thus, a garden can be a transgressing object, defining new relations in their limits and, consequently, a new urban reality. Simultaneously it can also be contextual in a more extensive sense than the one of the immediate neighbourhood, in the spatial acceptation of the term, in a profounder sense than the one of image, in other implications of a Garden in a City.