TANKING UP WITH ARCHITECTURE. The Lago do Jardim de Jericó in Valverde, Portugal

Current geopolitical, economic, and climatic issues make careless territorial management of water resources no longer sustainable. The topical critical climatic situation we are continuously facing – namely the increasingly long periods of drought, alternated with violent and abundant rainfall concentrated in the space of a few days – is pushing us to consider the improvement of efficiency of water systems as a matter of great urgency. By its very nature, hydraulic infrastructure is conceived at the scale of the landscape, and its networks spread throughout our territories and affect the development of human settlements. Nevertheless, as a set of technological devices, water infrastructure is intrinsically doomed to loss of efficiency and obsolescence over time. Besides technical engineering issues, working on the architectural form when coping with hydraulic design may be a successful strategy to control the life cycle of such pieces of infrastructure, while designing the contemporary landscape. The the Tank of Valverde (fig.1), Portugal, is a paradigmatic example of water architecture capable of stimulating reflections strategies in the virtuous direction of sustainable design.