Annalisa’s Work and Theoretical Practice

Afterstudyingherworkasanarchitect,educator,theorist,andauthor,weareeagerto discoverhowAnnalisagoesaboutherresearchanduniquedesignstrategy.Her fascinationwithandpassionfornatureandhumanbeingspromptthequestionsand driveourdiscussionwhereinsheoffersaglimpseintoherincrediblyvastknowledge andstudyofsuchthings.

Liz Mazzella: How do you measure what the social impacts are on the users of the spaces you design? Is this something that is done during a set part of a project, or something that you study over time from previous projects?

Annalisa: It’s a very fascinating topic really. I’m very fond of this idea to think that people, bodies with their presence, are a matter of architecture. So I always think about the presence of people in the context of the site as something to collaborate with the shape of the site. It’s not a matter of use - so we’re not thinking about people as the users, but I think about people as a part of architecture in terms of their geometry, even of their colors, and how they move. When I imagine a public space, I always try to figure people there that are collaborating and creating the scene. What is very important is to imagine how people will behave, and that’s not so easy. Luckily, it’s not easy because people are free and surprising. What I do is to go on the site and just observe people; what are they doing there? Because typically people are able to express desires - the way they are moving, the places they’re going on the site, or even the places where they are not going - places that are neglected. It’s a way to sort of express a project that isn’t silent, so nobody’s expressing it, but if you look at it you can observe people behaving, and understand what they want and what they do not want. So the first thing, according to me, is to go there, to take your time, and observe what people are doing. On the other side, what is important for me is to follow their desires, and so to co-design with them because when I try to follow their desires it’s a sort of co-design with people. I always try to not impose behaviors, as I was telling before. So imagine that open space could be a public platform where people can live and decide what they do and what they cannot do. This is a way to leave the design open and even to admit with their future behaviors as a way to co-design the site. I was telling before about our obsession with control, and my fascination with open spaces because I don’t know what will happen. It’s not a matter of plants, and animals even a matter of people, I don’t know what people will do there exactly, and I love to be surprised by what people can imagine to do. And I feel that this is a way to continue the designing of the site. It is never ending, because people are continuously designing the site with their presence. And I do not think about that as a sort of deminutio [in latin, it means decrease] of my role, but I think it’s wonderful to be surprised by your site. So take the time to look at the site before, but please take the time to look at the site later after the implementation of your project because you will discover a lot of things that you cannot imagine, and you will for sure discover that your design has never ended. It will continue just because people are there and are using it.

OS:A, “Every Nine Days” temporary installation at the American Academy in Rome, 2022. Steel plates were added at an interval of nine days to analyze the effect of nature on man-made structures over varying periods of time.

Julia Kenny: In your lecture, “A MatterofBodiesandAtmosphere” you redefine people as “tools of knowledge, activation, and configuration of urban spaces.” In your experience, why is it important/ beneficial to focus specifically on human behaviors in the realm of landscape architecture?

Annalisa: Yes. I think it is crucial. I admit, it is crucial. There is a wonderful book by Richard Sennett that is titled Flesh and Stone—it is a wonderful title. This is a history of the city going from central to Manhattan, to modern Manhattan, to describe how people are in the city and how their bodies are actually a tool to build public space. It takes into account questions about gender, but even questions about the poor or the rich, the in-power or not. The presence of bodies in public space tells us a lot of things. I started to enter into this topic when I discovered a wonderful couple—Lawrence Halprin and his wife Anna Halprin. Lawrence is a landscape architect, and Anna is a choreographer and a dancer. At a certain point in their life, they started to work together. They realized that they were doing exactly the same job, and that to design a public space and to imagine a choreography is exactly the same thing. The story is wonderful; I am very fond of their story because, at a certain point, Lawrence Halprin decided to move and to live in the woods. His wife Anna was embedded within in the city, where her heart is with the community. So Lawrence Halprin designed for her a sort of theater in the woods between the trees. It was like a present for her. And what happened is that she started to perform on that stage, and she completely changed the way she danced. She was dancing, not in a building, but in the open air. She started to have a connection with the wind, the humidity, the atmosphere, the sun, the light, and the shade. The way she changed her work as a dancer was so important and influential, that it changed the work of Lawrence Halprin as a landscape designer. He started to see and to be aware of how the presence of bodies was in relationship with the qualities of the space: it was a sort of reaction to the spaces. So, the way of organizing the shades and the temperature, and the shape of the space, was a suggestion for the body to enter into relation with the spaces. I think their lessons are absolutely important and crucial even for our time. But, I think it is absolutely crucial today. We have to stop imagining people just as users; instead, we should think about them as performers. This brings me again to the idea of control. What is the relation between a choreographer and a performer? Or between a musician

by Pierre Bal-Blanc.

as a composer and a musician as a performer? It is the reading. Any performer will interpret the score, and, in this way, there is a dimension of surprise or reenchantment again of something you cannot control. When a musician writes a piece of music, they really do not know how performers will play it. So, I think that open space design could be done in this way—as a dance score or a music score, letting people be the performers of our score.

Ethan Pilarski: In your experience as a landscape architect, do you feel that it is better when the projects are designed to be explored by people and open to the public, or if they are closed off and are more so used to preserve the nature in the city?

Annalisa: It depends, for example, we have many cases in contemporary cities now in Germany where they decided to close off some parts of the city where nature is going to develop and to wait for the natural biological cycles of nature to happen and to get stronger and then open up to the public. I think it is a way and it’s very important because it has different levels of interest. The first level is we don’t need to design everything and we can even accept that nature can decide by itself. We can even remake some parts of our land and just fence it and then see what happens there. This is very important I think today for our climate urgence, we are obsessed with the idea of planting trees everywhere. But perhaps we can have the same effects just letting nature do by herself and just enclosing some parks without doing anything, so it’s very important to mention that we don’t need to design everything. The harder part is about another very typical 20th century idea that is our obsession with the use of every single spot of land. There is a sort of obsession that sets the base of our zoning. When you make the zoning of the city you say this is for that, and typically you have parks because everything has a function. Letting some places for just nature not only for people to gather is even admitting perhaps we can imagine in our cities places with not a specific function. So we do not need to design everything, we don’t need to set the destiny, the functional destiny for every single spot of land, and so we can have no use and no design plans. But what is very important is again to mention that this is not a sort of [renounce], it is not a way to remove responsibility of this issue. But this is a decision, so this is a way to express our views as designers when we decide to elect a place in that way. So it is not a way to get rid of our responsibility, but to mention another kind of value for our site, so it plays without a function as a value or not. This is a problem. It plays without design, it has value or doesn’t have value. So I think that these questions are absolutely crucial for us, they are even important beyond the questions of nature, but are more general questions that regards our city. The idea of again not having the possession of control to imagine that we can just find some places and they are beautiful, powerful, and have value. I think it is something that could make us do exercises twisting our city to imagine new tools for our future.

Katelyn Owens: In one of my past classes we discussed how people view and understand the idea of nature. We found that many view nature as something other than the built environment, or as something untouched by humans. We found that this allows people to easily miss how their actions have a direct impact on nature. How do you propose to adjust this ideology of nature so that it encompasses the landscape and greenery humans interact with or do you think it is something that can even be reshaped?

Annalisa: I’m not able to tell you a single direction because it is advanced in accordance with the site. We were speaking about some cities in Germany, where it is a practice to just fence some places and say people are not allowed to go. But on the other side, we have places, such as London, that are proposing themself as a natural park city so completely overlapping the idea of city and of nature reserve that we usually think, or used to think of, as two separated ideas. I think it is important for us to overcome the ideology of separation. So what is nature and what is people? I am afraid that this idea of nature reserve has something to do with a sort of obsession of originity that are very dangerous even after dealing with politics, so this idea of going back to the origin because it is something safe. But because the origins or originity doesn’t exist, how can we define what is an artifact? An artifact is something that is transformed, it is manipulated. Is there something in the world that is not transformed by humans or itself? No. So everything in the world is in an evergoing process of transformation. So the idea of coming back to the origin makes no sense because there is not an origin there, and the idea of coming back to untouched nature is again, I think a very weird idea, because nature is not untouched. It is continuously touched by itself, by many kinds of advances that are continuously happening. Climate for example, but even the movement of the soil and the water. So even mentioning that without humans, nature is never untouched, it is continuously transformed. And if you go into this idea again, are nature reserves still something that has any sense or not. Or perhaps we have to think about a certain balance. This is a completely different idea to work in terms of balance, means to set the conditions for a dialogue not of the separation. Instances when you think about reserve, about fences, you are also thinking about separations of people here and nature there. I think that we could try to make something more interactive and more collaborative, and I think that there is a lot to do about that.

Daniel Brubaker: In your journal article “The Case of the Pontine Plain,” you mention how facism brought utopian ideas of landscape architecture, making designs more formalized. Does the concept of nature creeping in carefully thought out urban footprints, be considered as the start of a utopia for the natural world? Does this make the human lifestyle less beneficial as before?

Annalisa: Yes, it is absolutely important because it is a conflict between humans and nature. So, what is good and what is not? Do we need to save nature, or do we need to control nature? These are two opposing positions, but they answer the same question. On one side, I want to save and keep nature thriving. While on the other side, I think it is hurtful and dangerous, so I need to tame it. I think both of these opposite positions are absolutely dangerous to us, and we instead need to stay in the middle. What I was proposing in that paper [The Case of the Pontine Plain] was exactly the opportunity to imagine coming back to nature, but not in terms of shapes, while keeping the reasons of what we did as humans. Perhaps, this is the same situation as before when talking about past and future. We are used to thinking about this condition when we think about buildings, but why not nature?

Even nature is a matter of thinking about the past moving into nature. Instead of thinking about such a radical acquisition, what about to merge the condition as to say I can keep Mussolini’s layout, but at the same time I can use it as a platform for making nature again there. It is not a matter of what is good or what is bad. It is a way to create conditions for dialogue; I am completely convinced about that. Many other scholars have made similar research, and if I may suggest to you a new book that was published by MIT Press a couple months ago? It is called Mussolini’s Nature by Marco Armiero. He is an environmental historian and is one of the most important scholars in the field of environmental humanities. He wrote this wonderful book on the idea of nature from a position that describes nature always as a political matter. You cannot think that nature is innocent. When you decide to destroy something, to fence something, to let someone go or not, you are always inside a very precise question. So, be aware. Similarly, everyone is okay with planting trees because it feels so natural; but, it is really not. Our obsession with numbers like CO2, and the number of trees planted, is simply something very political. We are transforming nature, strictly in quantities, and that is something completely absurd. Instead, the real connection of the site to nature is far more important.

Jordan Ramsey: I have an interest in urban design, specifically on the revitalization of existing buildings/ urban areas. In blighted areas there tends to be overgrowth of nature. People tend to fear what they cannot control such as wild landscapes. What are the processes that you employ to help reshape how accepting people are about the idea of nature and allowing it to exist naturally in our spaces? How do you communicate these principles to the public who do not have the same knowledge as designers do?

Annalisa: Is very important because as you know, we are in a very strange season of things. On one hand, we like what we call, ‘wild nature.’ And it is even a trend in urban design. We have many experiences of new urban parks developed through this idea of wilderness that is designed. So you can understand it’s a product of an intention of human willingness. Instead, when we meet in the city, in a really wild place that is such of neglect, our judgment about the place is completely different, even if its image is not so different. Think about the park in Moscow by Diller and Scofidio that is a sort of wild situation in the city or design by Gilles Clement, for instance. On one side we can recognize human willingness, and on the other, we recognize neglect. So the matter is not aesthetic, it’s moral.

We are expressing a moral judgment on our presence in the city. So if wilderness is the by-product of design, it’s acceptable to us. But if wilderness is the by-product of our absence, it’s absolutely horrible. So which is the problem according to me? We as designers are asked to make people understand this message. For example, when we are facing real wild places, we can use very tiny devices to make people understand that it is not the effect of neglect but the effect of desires. For example, just cutting the herbs along the sides, you are telling people I am just cutting here, I could cut all that, but I’m just cutting here to demonstrate that I’m keeping that part of the wild. It is very little devices, but it is a crucial message that is telling people it is intentional. Or for example, putting other small devices such as benches, into a wild prairie, tells people, why not try to explore the site, why not try to enter, and perhaps there you will enjoy a wonderful situation. It’s a sort of invitation. So we have tools we can use to suggest to people to develop a different image of these places. Sometimes the quality is there, but we don’t see. We can use very simple tools to help people understand that. Some years ago I was in a park, and I was very surprised because I was walking into a high herbs prairie, along a path that was completely covered by the greenest grass I had ever seen in my life. In the film Big

Fish there is a city called Specter that has pavement completely covered in grass. It is completely uncanny. If you think of our city, you usually do not walk on the grass. The paths are paved or soil. If you pass here again over time, the soil will become compact, and herbs will not be able to grow. If I walk on that grass, what does it mean? It means the people that keep these places change the path and geometry. And it is great because it’s a way to keep fertility of the soil, and realize the different conditions of using this place. So every season, you will follow another direction, and see the site in a completely different way. So that path told me I wasn’t in just a wild place, but in a place that is being taken care of even though it seems just a wild prairie in the city. So little actions are so powerful because they narrate to people what is there. It’s a matter of design as a sort of story telling of nature.