Date: 2007/2009

Location: Santarém, Portugal

Area: 11.420 sqm

Client: Municipality of Santarém

Project Coordinators:
João Ferreira Nunes, Carlos Ribas

Project Collaborators:
Sílvia Basílio, Margarida Henriques, Rita Leal

Architecture:
Teresa Castro e José Soalheiro

Speciality:
BETAR, Estudos e projectos de Estabilidade
JOULE, Projectos, Estudos e Coordenação
Triagonal, Engenheiros e Consultores

The space occupied by the República Garden is part of a highly urbanized area, intricately related to the centre of the city, a place of representation and framing of patrimonial elements of great relevance. The proposal adjusts to a very flexible space, designated to establish a platform worthy to the urban insertion of which it usufructs and to the buildings that it frames, establishing a daily use of the urban equipped garden and a  configuration that permits to lodge cultural events, small markets, etc. The general concept of intervention becomes real in the definition of a material recognisably organised as a matrix, capable to conduct to the establishment of a coherent functionality and to absorb, within unique and imaginative evocating logic, the scattered and discordant elements that constitute the pre-existence that is to be excavated. This unifying material incorporates, as the fundamental elements, the pre-existing architectural elements of interest with the existing arboreal covering and the circumstances of urban confrontation that define especially the area of intervention.