CORDOARIA GARDEN

Date: 1999/2000

Location: Porto, Portugal Location in Google Maps

Area: 8.000 sqm

Client: Sociedade Porto 2001 S.A.

Project Coordinators:
João Ferreira Nunes, Carlos Ribas

Project Collaborators:
Nuno Jacinto, Luís Carvalho, Carla Silva, Nuno Mota

Architecture:
Camilo Cortesão e Mercês Vieira

Speciality:
Victor Abrantes
GEG - Paulo Pimenta
Rodrigues Gomes

The Cordoaria Garden is a manifesto. Like in so many other situations of the same time, the embodiment of profound social changes via the elegant appropriation of a space of profoundly popular characteristics in a desperate Europeanising effort of a way of living that is still autonomous and different. The chosen path is an author's design that corresponds to a very precise concept regarding the environment to be created and the different possible ways of living in it, substituting a square by a fair and other large social gathering spaces.
The Garden was no longer a closed off space but it was limited by diffuse borders. This far-reaching change never went beyond the vegetation. The outline of the paths, the sitting and recreational areas, the position of the statues were nonsensical and misguided. This proposal aims to take on the abovementioned fluidity of frontiers including it in an area without obvious transitions between green and inert zones. The project is the re-design of the whole area from the Palace of Justice to the triangle of the Clérigos, of the Relação to the Guarda Republicana as a unique space: a square subject to the same, almost obsessive, rule; a homogenous space despite the differences in situations, where singular and autonomous entities like the Science Faculty, the old quarter and the plantain grove appear.
In the Garden area the repetitive pattern is made of specific materials. The line of the paths and the location of the sitting areas are now transgressing the geometric rule of the overall design, aligned with new flows and destinations. The paths are traced like voids that interrupt the continuity of successive strips. Organizing the area into a changeable fabric of a clear standard rule, the cellular consistency of the design identifies the whole space as one organism, making it recognizable as a living body, regardless of the locally apparent fabric.