land scape architecture
palimpsest Prof. Antonio di Campli
USAC, Turin, 14 june 2012
“The inhabitants of a land tiressly erase and rewrite the ancient scrawls of the soil”. André Corboz, The Land as a Palimpsest, 1983
After two centuries during which land management had known no other formula than that of the tabula rasa, a developed concept was designed which no longer considered the land as a quasi-abstract field of operation, but as the result of a very lengthy and very slow stratification which should be understood before acting. But the archaeological concept of stratification does not yet provide the most apropiate metaphor for describing the phenomenon of acumulation. Most layers are both thin and filled with lacunae. In particular, man does not simply add to this layers, he also erases them. Certain strata were willfully done away with. The land, so heavily charged with traces and with past readings, seems very similar to a palimpsest. To set up new developments, to exploit more rationally certain lands, it is often necessary to modify their substance in an irreversible manner. But the land is not a throw-away wrapper or a consumer product which can be replaced. Every land is unique, whence the need to “recycle�, to scrape clean once more (if possible) with the greatest care the ancient text where men have written across the irreplaceable surface of the soil, in order to make it available again so that it meets today’s needs before being done away with in its turn.
James Corner & Alex MacLean, Taking Measures Across the American Landscape, Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1996
Michel Desvigne(1958) The Palimpsest
Urban park, Issoudun, 1995 (23000 sqm)
The city of Issoudun, a small town of medieval origin located in the Indre region, along the southern Massif Central, has asked the Parisian landscape and Christine Michel Desvigne Dalnoky, to define a project for the transformation into a public park of a land at the edge of town and previously occupied by small plots of urban vegetable gardens and homes. The area, the extension of three hectares, is bisected by Théols river, whose banks are lined with natural willows and poplars. The quadripartite division of the grid is an explicit formal reference architecture “educated” French gardens of 700. The design of the park recalls the rural character of the area, taking the plot of the old particle divisions highlighted by new trees planting. The great square that overlooks the river is an explicit reference to the of seventeenth-century French garden design tradition; its extension beyond the main path, by contrast, is constituted by a garden of dwarf willows, and finally by a forest full of willows. The internal subdivision of parcels - ruled by long parallel rows of plantings of irises and shrubs - recall, rather, agricultural techniques of the Middle Ages. The creation of the internal paths, grass and wood, provides the connection between neighborhood blocks from the river due to walkways that connect the two sides. The paths are made of planks of raw wood, in two occasions the walkways are transformed into bridges, arching, cross the river, often bordering on it, leaning forward as suspended walkways.
Michel Desvigne, Issoudun District
palimpstest
values heritage identity implicit project