João Nunes - PROAP Landscape Fab Lab Antwerp
Landscape Architecture on Thursdays
Antwerp, the ‘Laboratory city’ internationally recognised for its ambitious urban vision, is the focus of the spring 2025 season of Landscape Architecture on Thursdays. In response to the challenges of the environmental crisis, bold landscape-led thinking plays a central role in its urban renewal strategy.
During this event, award-winning Portuguese landscape architect João Nunes will present PROAP’s redesign of the Scheldt quays, a project that powerfully connects the city to its river. Whilst serving as a flood protection, the design skilfully plays with geometry and surfaces, blurring boundaries between technical dyke and open space, shifting perceptions to transform an engineering necessity into a fluid, aesthetic and flexible open space where inhabitants and visitors can stroll, relax, play, enjoy festivals and markets along the river…
An astute work on materialities and shapes, shifting perceptions and metamorphosing this hitherto derelict area into a vast terrace onto the river, the project transforms the territory by way of a striking topography that protects and connects, creates shelter and openness, forming a dialogue between past and future, between humans and natural phenomena, between the city and its river.
Reinstating Antwerp’s quality of ‘City on the River’, the project is just one of the many landscape architecture projects implemented within the framework of the Strategic Spatial Structure Plan developed by Paula Viganó and Bernardo Secchi in 2006.
João Nunes will delve into the PROAP’s design philosophy, exploring the notions of transformation, adaptation and process, key aspects in the studio’s approach for developing narratives that make every single of its projects a unique response to the site and its metabolism.
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Bio
João Nunes (Lisbon, 1960) is a landscape architect with a great passion for drawing and understanding the processes of the world. He is the founder of PROAP, whose philosophy is to interpret the mechanisms of Landscape, within which the Project is introduced as an integral part of the process of transformation of the world. His professional and teaching activities are intertwined and contribute to the development of new lines of research and experimentation. He is a full professor at the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio and Visiting Professor at international universities.
In the course of his career, he has been awarded various prizes: 2016 ‘Fabrizio Gagliardi’ Cittá di Asti Architecture Prize; 2020 International Architecture Prize (PIDA); 2022 AIAC ‘Masters of Architecture’ Prize; 2023 Selinunte International Prize for Landscape.
