Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles died. A sentence that, due to your state of health, has been expected for some time to have to be written, but for which we are never really prepared.
Ribeiro Telles' work has accompanied me, curiously, from an early age, without having ever told him so, in the meetings that I had the happiness of sharing with him.
Literally from the first and strongest images that I can recognize as mine, long before I knew who Ribeiro Telles was, what Landscape Architecture was, and even more so to imagine that someday I would be a landscape architect.
In a photograph of my parents' wedding, in the 70s of the last century, they both appear impeccable, smiling, happy. To frame them, the garden of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, designed by Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles, together with António Viana Barreto. In a perfect picture. Because, more than framing them, the garden involves them, sharing their happiness, amplifying it, making it reverberate throughout the space, in a sublime geometry, made of intangible lines.
Many years later, when visiting space, and finding myself in the perspective of where that photo was taken, I smile. Because I relived their happiness. And I relive it today, every time I return there and pass through it, without fail. And I relive that of so many other people, because that is a space of, precisely, happiness. An unspeakable, ethereal happiness that the senses apprehend, but it is the spirit that interprets.
Because Ribeiro Telles' trait was oriented towards happiness.
A happiness that he dreamed of for Portugal, beyond our capacity to fulfill ourselves. With balanced, productive landscapes, of a democratic and humanist country, with identity, quality of life and social justice.
Dreams built with pragmatism. “Utopia and feet on the earth”, as the title of the exhibition dedicated to his life and work perfectly sums up.
That is why he bequeathed us the National Reserves (Ecological and Agricultural), the bases for an Environmental and Spatial Planning policy or an internationally recognized school of Landscape Architecture.
Its contribution in the field of spatial planning and reflection on the spatial expression of the country's identity and its development policies, together with those around them, was decisive for the construction of a post-25 April less unbalanced.
He tempered, with massive doses of common sense and enlightenment, and Job's patience, the excesses of voluntarism of a little enlightened and very troubled euphoria. Already before, in a dictatorship that he always contested, he dared to point his finger at the mistakes that everyone wanted to silence, as in the floods in Lisbon in 1967.
A man of tremendous simplicity and affability, his humor and smile generated immediate empathy. And the unbroken spirit of mission and achievement impressed. His teachings were inspiring stories, which flowed with the taste of his eyes and what he found.
Ribeiro Telles did his part. Much more, even. It returns to the land from which, truly, it never left, as it was in the land that its roots were always deeply founded, nourished by a deep love for it and for everything that emerged from it.
Mainly to people.
We owe him nothing, because the greatness of the greatest is precisely this: giving without expecting anything in return. We owe it to ourselves and to those to come, to perpetuate their dream and enhance their legacy, having the generosity of always dreaming better, and working towards it. And never conform or resign ourselves to anything less than the fullness of utopia.
Because, as Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles taught us, we are the gardeners of our future.
Let the earth be light for you.
Author Gonçalo Gomes is a landscape architect, president of the Algarve Regional Section of the Portuguese Association of Landscape Architects (APAP).
(and writes according to the old Spelling Agreement)
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