Francisco Caldeira CabralGCIH • GOIP was a Portuguese landscape architect. He was an active and internationally reputed landscape architect from the 1940s to the 1980s. He was a pioneer in the practice, study and teaching of Landscape Architecture, and he was a pioneer of the Portuguese environmental movement.
Family
Son of António Caldeira Cabral and his wife Alice Monteiro. Born in Lisbon, Campo de Sant’Ana, nº 46, Freguesia da Pena, 26 October 1908. Married Alfreda Ferreira da Fonseca with whom he had nine children, including Francisco Manuel Caldeira Cabral and Pedro Caldeira Cabral.
Biography
Francisco Caldeira Cabral studied in Colégio Vasco da Gama, Sintra, and in the Colégio dos Jesuítas de La Guardia in Galiza, having finished his high-school studies in 1925. He then decided to study chemistry at Berlin-Charlottenburg Technical University, Germany, requesting some years later a transfer to electric engineering. However, pneumonia forced him to return to Portugal and, between 1931 and 1936, he studied agronomy at the Instituto Superior de Agronomia, Lisbon. After graduating, he returned to Berlin, with a scholarship from Instituto de Alta Cultura and joined the landscape architecture course at Friedrich-Wilhelm University, under Professor Heinrich Friedrich Wiepking-Jürgensmann, and obtained the gardener diploma, in 1939. He started teaching in 1940 at the Instituto Superior de Agronomia da Universidade Técnica de Lisboa on "Desenho Organográfico" and "Construções Rurais". Shortly after that, he proposed an open-course on landscape architecture at the ISA – which was accepted. The course was optional and of free access and he started lecturing in 1941. Among his first students were landscape architects Gonçalves Ribeiro Telles and Antonio Viana Barreto who later made important contributions in several areas, including landscape planning and architecture. In 1965 he was awarded the prize Fritz Schumaker for Landscape Planning. Between 1979 and 1986 he was a guest professor and lecturer at Evora University. During 1956 and 1986 he lectured as a guest at several universities, namely Hannover University, Berkeley University, Georgia University, Newcastle University, Michigan University, Escuela Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid, Escuela Superior de Ingenieros de Montes, Pennsylvania University and Instituto Agronomico Mediterraneo. He was president of IFLA and a founding member of Liga para a Protecção da Natureza having been its second president in 1951–52. He also presided over the Nature Conservation Section of the Lisbon Geographic Society in 1956, and proposed in 1963, the creation of a Portuguese Natural Parks and Natural Reserves system. This was in line with his concept of "Continuum Naturale" He received Portugal honorific titles of "Grande-Oficial da Ordem da Instrução Pública" and "Grã-Cruz da Ordem do Infante D. Henrique" In his honour the Centro de Estudos de Arquitectura Paisagista – Prof. Francisco Caldeira Cabral was created in 2002, and in 2008, on the centenary of his birth, his name was given to a garden in Teleheiras, and to the Francisco Caldeira Cabral Park, in Algés.
Continuum Naturale
In line with its relationship in regard to man and nature he conceived the "Continuum Naturale" concept.
Works
1940's
1940: Garden of house of Carneiro Pacheco, Estoril
1941: Quinta da Aldeia, in Estação Agronómica Nacional
