Aurora Carapinha

"Many political decision-makers have no clue what we do”

It was out of pure chance given the country’s circumstances that she ended up being student number six in Portugal’s first landscape architecture course in 1975. She didn’t know what she was getting into. In any case, it went well. Aurora Carapinha, researcher, landscape architect honoured with the Ribeiro Telles Prize in 2021, really likes to be a professor, to pass on her acquired knowledge to younger people. To think with the students about the pressing problems that are being faced in the field to which she has dedicated her life. A fight that she struggles with every day. An unavoidable name, she declines the importance they attribute to her. She uses her voice to keep trying to remind society and political decision-makers of the urgency to take important measures for the country.

You were student number six in the first landscape architecture course in the country. What led you to choose this field?
I didn’t even know what I was going into. I finished what was the seventh year of the old high school. In 1974, the universities closed and only opened in 1975. And I actually could have gone into the arts, economics or geography, or into science, maths or physics. Coincidentally, that same year, the University Institute of Évora opened in Évora, and there was a course in biophysical and landscape planning (it wasn’t called landscape architecture). And I went to try it out, to see what it was like, and I liked it. Then, in 1980, the idea was to create a landscape architecture course in Évora, but there was some pressure from Lisbon, for wanting to create a landscape architecture course outside the capital’s structures. However, Ribeiro Telles and a team ended up creating this course, which initially was a Bachelor’s degree and which, after a short time, became a degree in landscape architecture. In other words, it is the first official degree in landscape architecture. And I had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself in for. I enrolled in that course, just as I could have enrolled in another. I went to the one that opened first. It was a bit of a strange time. Strange in the sense that we didn't really know how universities were going to work. The course started on the 11th of November and I began to like it. At the beginning, the team of teachers was not yet the one that would teach me later, but it was already a course with very interesting people. And from then on, I discovered an area that, if I went back, I would choose again.

A happy coincidence...
Yes, yes. We often have pleasant surprises in life, and this was one of the pleasant surprises in my life, entering a course I knew nothing about. I had seen an interview with Ribeiro Telles in 1967 - I was still very young at the time - about the floods, and I found it very interesting. Later, when I revisited Ribeiro Telles time at the university, I said: "Look, this was that gentleman who drew very well”. And that was it. From then on, I was always very attached to the course and the ideas and I realised that one of the best things out there is to be able to see the innovative way in which landscape architecture thought at that time and which is still contemporary today. The idea of improving the quality of the communities’ lives made me fall in love with it and here I am, not regretting it at all. Quite the contrary.

Your name is unavoidable in this field and you have always been extremely proactive. Out of so many projects, is there one that stands out the most, either for the lessons learnt or for the difficulties you faced?
I love being a landscape architect, I love the practice and theory of landscape architecture, but what I really love is the possibility of teaching it. Making this knowledge, this body of theory and practice reach a greater number of people. Trying to explain what Caldeira Cabral and Ribeiro Telles already said, that our profession is a profession of the future; they said that in the 60s, imagine that! Today, we are in their future and knowing that today landscape architecture is fundamental, that it combines knowledge from many fields, that it approaches topics that we have already studied for decades, is extraordinary. So, what I really like is to be a professor of Landscape Architecture, because I like to share my knowledge.

You have been a professor for many years. What are the concerns that have been troubling your students?
There are two parts to the answer. The first one is: do policy makers realise what we are? It is extremely important to understand that many of them do not have a clue about what we do. They patronise us because they think we only work in gardens. In actual fact, we first started many years ago, at the very beginning of humanity, to work in that field. But we have progressed and our entire theory is much broader than gardens. The garden, being the work of art, is not where we exhaust ourselves. Look at what is happening now, I would say, almost in a foolish and ignorant way, on the part of some political decision-makers, who think that the housing problem will be solved by occupying agricultural land, from the RAN (National Agricultural Reserve), which they believe can become building land. This is nonsense, and we are all worried about it. In the end, we end up having houses, but we jeopardise our future in terms of food. We already import a lot, but this way we will import a lot more. And don’t forget that these soils are also very important for the water cycle.
In second place, as policymakers have no such awareness, they have again turned to fragmented knowledge, to biologists, to geographers. The word sustainability today is almost vague, I often don’t even understand what they are talking about. And this means that young people and their concerns are often more focused on environmental issues and even leave humans out of it. And it’s essential that they are there and that they know how to manage, with an integrated and systemic vision, the issues of the environment, the economy, culture, with the presence of humanity, with the issues of sociology. There is not just one answer to each of the current issues. There are multiple answers and what we are seeing more and more is a fragmentation of knowledge.

"What I really love is the possibility of teaching landscape architecture”

The name can also be misleading... People often think that landscape architects are just about gardens, something beautiful...
Well, I’m not a more or less landscape architect. "Landscape” is not a qualifying adjective. Caldeira Cabral always gave us that example. The chimney sweep is the chimney sweep. If I just say sweep, it’s not enough. If I say just chimney, that’s not enough either. So, if I say architect or if I just say landscape, I always lack another dimension, the dimension that, having a systemic vision, having an operative concept of landscape, I now have to know how to design and, based on creation, design the future, anticipate problems, solve the current problems, through the creation of spaces. We are creators of space and places for people and all living beings to inhabit with a quality of life.

And many of these problems, as you said, if they had been seen as urgent a long time ago, today, at least, they would already be well on the way to being resolved....
They have been thought about and discussed for a long time. And they have been written down and studied for many years. Even in the free landscape architecture and agronomy course, in the texts by Ribeiro Telles, Caldeira Cabral, Ilídio de Araújo and many others from another generation, these issues have already been raised. But, in fact, we work a bit like Pinocchio’s cricket, we spend our time against the current and we all know, for example, that the profession of the architect, from the time of the Renaissance, is almost an arm of the government. If you ask which landscape architect, other than Ribeiro Telles, managed to be Minister for Quality of Life, Under-Secretary of State, Councillor at the Lisbon City Council, and managed to implement a series of very interesting measures regarding people’s quality of life, you will only see that name.

Regarding the atmosphere, the climate, we already have many problems. Floods, droughts... Should the attention given to drainage plans today have been done back then? Because now it doesn’t seem to be having an impact....
No, it doesn’t. With regard to Lisbon’s drainage plan, I think we have to think about water cycle management plans. With drainage, we remove excess water. Nowadays, this excess is extremely important. It is in excess at a certain time, but we need it when it is lacking. And so, we should think of other systems that don’t just drain the water and then throw it away. Obviously, the plan, the drainage plan that is taking place in Lisbon, has some attitudes that are being added, but it should have many more. It can’t be limited to this resolution, getting from A to B quickly and getting the water out of there, when we’re going to need a growing amount of water and we’re also going to need more soil. If we continue to waterproof - this is an idea that almost borders on the absurd - if we continue to make it difficult for water to permeate the soil and feed the different aquifers (which will happen), we will increasingly have to build larger tunnel drainage systems. We have to add to this a series of complementary measures: decreasing the impermeability of the soil creates more retention basins, so that the water that flows into these tunnels, into the river and then into the sea, becomes less and less and I can have more water in the ground. It’s so simple, it’s common sense.

Besides these challenges, both old and current and likely to continue to be challenges in the future, would you like to add any more?
There are so many. And one of the biggest is to stop thinking that gardens are stages and that the landscape is a stage, that it is scenery where everything happens. We are constantly seeing the concept of gardens, of boulevards, of parks, being distorted into something that has been replaced by the idea of green space. And anything can happen, such as music festivals, when these structures, regardless of their typology (parks, boulevards and others), could be spaces by their nature, through their matter, through the design they present. They can be very interesting spaces that offer, within the completely artificial environments of cities, that contact with nature that we consider to be fundamental and of which we are a part. In my view, artificiality is on the increase. Obviously, if we do not re-establish this relationship bond that we had with nature and that we have always had, because we are part of it, we belong to this universe, the more we create this dichotomy between urban and rural, the worse it will be. Everything is much more difficult.