Date: 1994/2008
Location: Lisbon/Loures, Portugal 
Area: 900 000 sqm
Client: Parque Expo'98 S.A.
Conception/Construction Competition (with Hargreaves Associates) 1st Prize
Project Coordinators:
João Ferreira Nunes, Carlos Ribas
Project Collaborators:
Cristina Vasconcelos, Elsa Calhau, Margarida Quelhas, Nuno Mota, Sandra Ferreira, Vera Ramos, Ana Lúcia Mateus, Maria Zás, Nuno Jacinto, Paula Antunes, Iñaki Zoilo, António Magalhães de Carvalho
Speciality:
Hargreaves Associates: George Hargreaves, Glenn Allen, Mary Margareth
Lacerda Moreira/Silvino Maio
Hidrotécnica Portuguesa
Ana Barroco e Esteves Correia
Vitor Jesus
GR
Grade Ribeiro
José Charters Monteiro
Aires Mateus e Associados
Alberto Souza Oliveira, Arquitectura
The Tejo and Trancão Park covers approximately 90ha of riverside area on the right bank of the river Tejo, from the Vasco da Gama Tower, located on the southern boundary of the park, to the Trancão river, which forms it’s northern boundary, encompassing the EXPO’98 intervention area. A set of profoundly marking activities, regrettably characteristic of town boundary situations, converged in defining an exceptional landscape and environmental disqualification. This set of situations occur in the immediate vicinity of the Tejo’s Estuary Natural Reserve, a site of unwavering ecological and landscape potential. The proposal aimed to establish a spatial organization that offer great scenic, visual and sensorial diversity, sustained by a structure which reflects the coherence and formal unity in the perception of the broad intervention.
The formalization of the structure results in the combination of three distinctly hierarchic elements: the landforms represent the fundamental landscape structuring element, shaping ecological, scenic and use consequences, which establish the meaning of the prospective landscape: three-dimensional, diversified, rhythmic. These landforms, particularly the wind formed ones, define, due to their relative layout and orientation, not merely a formal score, but, above all, an ecological rhythm that is repeated throughout the park, essentially by means of the contrast between gentle facing slopes and the abrupt north facing ones. Planting zones and plant cover accentuate this contrast, coinciding typologies and specific floristic sets with matching ecological situations, anticipating the result that time and nature would eventually take upon them to establish. Given that what is intended is an intensely lived park, the introduced systems are necessarily artificial in order to withstand a suitable ecological load. The path system composes a hierarchical network that defines, in itself, an autonomous structure, functional, subsidiary to the three dimensional structure with which it is articulated in an indissoluble manner.