Date: 2003/2007

Location: Belém, Lisbon, Portugal

Area: 6.256 sqm

Client: Associação de Amizade Portugal-Japão

Project Coordinators:
João Ferreira Nunes, Carlos Ribas

Project Collaborators:
Carla Silva, Iñaki Zoilo, Mariana Gomes Sargo, Margarida Quelhas, Rita Pacheco

This project began with a unique challenge: to develop a concept, a theme in an abstract site. In fact, work began with the elaboration of a design approach for a theme – the commemoration of the 460 years of friendship Portugal/Japan – which would allow us to find an ideal site.

Hence, in the first drawings the theme is approached as disengaged from a context. On one hand, this procedure is only possible because it is a garden, a space which is, in definition, out of context, autonomous, articulated merely by means of the fantasy of who suggests it and of who proposes to live in it.

The process set off well, and after a few months, we were able to move on to the phase of corresponding initial drawings to a specific site reality, which was found in a privileged location, precisely in Belém riverside between the Monument to the Discoveries (Padrão dos Descobrimentos) and the Tower of Belém, between the Cultural Centre of Belém and the River Tejo.

The project has, since its first drafts, approached the creation of an artificial topography, a set of landforms which shaped two parallel hill systems.
The aim was to create a moving, wavy, surface which beard Japanese Cherry trees – Prunus x yedoensis, in a perfect grid planting system.

On one hand the grid enhanced the landforms and allowed an assessment of height variation. On the other hand, the cherry tree canopies repeated the form of the bearing surface, creating a second topography, visible in the ground level as a reflection of the first topography, as if creating an elevated ground. The fact that during the blossoming period, the canopy mass assumes the consistency of a cloud, made us propose another material to suggest the landform replication.

Thus, the garden space became limited above and beneath by the similar shapes, which differ materially.

The landforms release the centre of the garden, opening a flat surface which establishes a passageway which traverses the entire garden in black gravel. A path of reflection, discovery and emotion.