We would like to express our gratitude to all the students who participated in the first three editions of the International Workshop. Your valuable contributions to this reflection are highly appreciated. We are proud to be part of Politecnico di Milano – Polo Territoriale di Piacenza, where this adventure began, and we are honored to have worked with our colleagues, guests, tutors and students.
Landscape Of[f] Limits
Sara Protasoni
The Shape of Water: Rivers and Forms
Michele Roda
Let’s Play: Fragments between the Limits
Marco Navarra
Discontinuities and Flows, Islands and Gradients in the City of Piacenza
Sara Anna Sapone
Communication Networks and Circulation’s
Infrastructures
Lina Malfona
We shall all be Transgressors
Karim Nader
Mapping the Limits: a Multidimensional Journey
Giulia Cazzaniga
Via Emilia: a Daily Infrastructure.
Architecture and Landscapes face the Change of a Historic Road
Giulia Setti
Teaching and learning an Unconfined Discipline
Pedro Campos Costa, Ilaria La Corte
How Landscape Architecture can shape the World
James Corner
Unveiling The Difficult Limits and the Creative drawings
Valerio Morabito
Portfolio 2020 | 2021 | 2022
and References
Preface
LANDSCAPE OF[F] LIMITS
Sara Protasoni
It is not easy today to delineate the contours of a disciplinary field, that of landscape architecture, in which new ideas are continually bursting forth, at times presenting themselves as new paradigms, other times flanking previous ones, without becoming recognized alternatives. Sometimes, they may revive forgotten or misunderstood concepts at other times asserting themselves with unexpected force only to dissolve within the space of a few years. As architects, we are called upon to investigate this complex and stratified whole, a matter made up of advancements and
returns, certainly with the determination to open ourselves up to contaminations that go beyond conventional disciplinary boundaries, but always keeping the project, its conceptual and operational tools relating to its being an anticipation of a different future condition, at the center. Even the object of our research as landscape architects appears to us today to be increasingly complex, stratified and changeable: there is now a widespread awareness that different phenomena coexist in the whole of the processes of transformation of a place, which are always unstable result of the relationships between
visible and invisible, macroscopic and microscopic elements.
The space we deal with is inhabited, traversed, modified, cultivated, constructed and destroyed not only by human beings but also by animals and plants: multiple events and trajectories mark the earth’s environments with traces of the presence of different living beings. In this interweaving of dynamics, time plays an essential role as a measure of spatial relations and transformations, which always raises the question of the survival and extinction of living beings, of the inertia and transformation of the elements that make up physical space. The very concept of the Anthropocene shifts our present in Earth time, measured in 4.6 billion years. This volume aims to trace the coordinates of research around landscape architecture that is plural, hence capable of bridging projects, works and ideas developed in different places while remaining close to operationality. In particular, ecology enters the field of landscape design as a combination of practices and expertise aimed at investigating the relationship between nature, technology, living systems and interpretative subjects; it becomes, as Timothy Morton has recently emphasized, a functional hybrid space for the formation of a reticular thought that can contribute to the definition of an environmental consciousness more aware of the interrelations between human and nonhuman and of the need to remove the rigid boundaries between the two worlds, along with the idea of Nature with a capital N, and to
renounce the imposition of a human order on the biosphere.
This place of plural research on landscape architecture is based on certain fundamental assumptions. The first is that the landscape architect is never placed in front of a situation but within it, in a context that manifests itself on several moving and interfering levels, involving him in different capacities, not only as a technician and an intellectual but also as an individual and a living being. Secondly, for each task, the designer is called upon to specify the purpose of his intervention, to identify and interpret its conditions, and to verify the degree of logical and technical consistency of the possible operational proposals. Thirdly, this collocation as part of the situations and context implies not only the exercise of a set of theoretical and practical means that refer to multiple skills and background knowledge but also the continuous negotiation between the objectives that emerge from this multiplicity of competing approaches. This condition makes the processes accompanying the transformation of territories and landscapes, between planning and implementation, extremely articulated. Each transformation, in other words, requires the confrontation of sets – often conflicting and not always ordered within them – of social practices and values; of legal norms and constraints; of expectations, memories, desires, programs and representations brought into the field by different actors, which each time can overturn that relationship
LANDSCAPE OF[F] LIMITS
WATERS
In the previous page:
Equilibrium from Difficult Limits series by Valerio Morabito
Hand Digital Drawing - 2023
THE SHAPE OF WATER: RIVERS AND FORMS
Michele Roda
Water is a horizontal surface, or at least tends towards horizontality. When it is a sea or a large lake it becomes a new horizon. But even a large river is, for most of its cycle, an emblem of calm and tranquillity, sometimes transparency. When, on the other hand, it foams, it is a temporary condition: a movement towards placidity. This character helps to focus identity of a water limit and related issues. That is – it’s the first paradox we need to understand – the contrary of the horizontality.
A water limit is, usually and typically, deep. Deep and multi-layer, made of many components, some of them visible, some of them hidden; but in a circularity which admits rhythm and sequences very
far the human ones, fillings and droughts alternate seasonally, in a logic that climate change makes less and less predictable and which for this reason becomes, in its own way, uncontrollable. And therefore scary. The waters rise and fall, occupying and freeing spaces.
It is an intensity of movement that can leave us indifferent when the water – especially in urban environments, often restrained in high and strong embankments – seems to lose its own character, reduced to a bit player. But it is instead an absolutely extraordinary dimension because there are no other elements (natural or artificial) that change so rapidly and with diverse interacting cycles.
LANDSCAPE
to improvise an outdoor cinema to cooking desks to facilitate the creation of community cafeterias; from raised technical floors for assembling temporary workspaces to the playgrounds with which Aldo van Eyck equipped Amsterdam’s open areas. Rather than a fixed and stable whole, infrastructure can be seen as a sum of different elements that may be replaced, adapted and updated, as structures on which different components, cells or modules can be installed and uninstalled at will.
A MAP OF POSSIBILITIES
In conclusion, communications networks, following the model of intangible networks,
should be adaptive structures, devices that can easily be changed in their configuration while not altering their structure. In other words, rather than being a limitation to city life, infrastructures should be meeting places such as those advocated by urban planner Jane Jacobs.
It is interesting to consider Richard Sennett’s position on this point, according to which architects and urban planners should design for indeterminacy, by proposing not so much a finished product as a research, that is, a process that may include several possibilities, to be discussed with all the agents involved10.
In other words, according to Sennett, the architect should become a mediator amongst the social actors involved, a negotiator, in essence an
and foremost. A fallen Roman boundary could be seen as an insignificant ruin, we look at it as an open boundary wall to walk on. On the E70, we imagined ecological systems to cover it and produce energy and imbibe it with public life. Where the Tangenziale broke Via Emilia’s flow, we imagined a traversing park transversely. Where agriculture stopped bluntly at the northwestern edge of the city, we sought to reconnect it through winery programs and urban agriculture. Where the Roman boundary wall fell apart, we imagined walking above the edge in a continuous landscaped park. Where the military men sang ‘Bella Ciao’ at the edge of river Po before going to the war, we imagined public pools for meeting again in peace. Every time, through collage or through model-making, it was the spontaneous act of making whether digital or hand-made that sewed again the fragments once disconnected or fallen apart.
After our experiments on site, the concept of a projected renewed integration given back to Piacenza by the River Po or along Via Emilia is conceptualized today as a recovered coherence that acknowledges and even celebrates the initial contradictory conditions. We therefore do not seek to recover the purity of the urban form of a distant and lost past, nor do we seek to obliterate boundaries nonetheless sometimes haphazardly imposed upon the urban landscape. Our approach to recovery, once again, is through acceptance of contradictory space (open/closed, smooth/striated, pure/impure…) and working with contradiction, in a joyful manner. The urban scape offers today renewed opportunities to reconnect and there is no place for nostalgia nor futurism in it,
only a creative game of recombinations in the present tense, the integration of new sustainable technologies as needed without fetishism nor ideology, and the infusion of public space, ground permeability, multifarious public programs to the maximum extent possible. Amongst all this activity, space left to space is paramount, that is the moment of silence in a city, the openness of a perspective without purpose in itself other than it simply being here. In our trip to Torino in 2002, what was beyond the signs and boundaries was the smoothness of the continuous landscape. One would have to say in fact, that this smoothness was actually prior to the making of signs or boundaries. But in the human perception, such fictive notions of edge, nationality and identity have become so intensely real that we forget that earth was once a one undifferentiated landscape.
The feeling of transgression only came from the fear of actually crossing a boundary that only existed in our imagination. That night reminded me that drawing a line is a man-made act and whether in an earthquake or at sunrise, nature will express itself devoid of the acknowledgement of any line whatsoever. Ultimately, if we are to speak, it is because we have something to say. Freedom from boundary should be the quality of every human being, politically, socially and foremost spiritually.
p. 46, 47 | Students at work during the L[O]L workshop activities, Politecnico di Milano – Piacenza Campus. Picture by the author.
p. 49 | Final model. Picture by the author.
LANDSCAPE
Images:
TEACHING AND LEARNING AN UNCONFINED DISCIPLINE
Pedro Campos Costa, Ilaria La Corte
Architecture teaching is about how to create a process, with a present-time focus and with transdisciplinary management skills. It is not a “science” as narrowly understood. It is rather the specialization in generic and management tools. We could also argue: what are the important or essential subjects of this small core?
Looking at most architecture courses we might say such ‘core’ includes: drawing, history, architectural theory, geometry, geography, urban planning, and –if not in most curriculums – we might also consider philosophy, anthropology, sociology, law, public relations, marketing, engineering, landscape, economics, psychology, art, sound and so on. What
is unanimous about this boundless discipline of ‘architecture’ is the project: all the faculties of architecture have the project as their main subject, the central subject, a clear disciplinary core. Making a project requires managing complexity of different subjects and conditions of different origins. To make a project there is preparation and information on different subjects. In practice, it’s necessary to understand different subjects, and to make a synthesis as an answer. Architecture does not exist without a connection to the society and its natural and built contexts, its influence from policies and politics, it has to listen to tendencies and thesis, update in construction systems and
materials or even research on it, it has to understand engineering principles, it has to manage urban complexity, and relations with the environment, it has to be aware of beauty, psychology, comfort and health, as also ecological and other needs that the society in the present time aims. It’s quite clear that keeping the project in the vast unconfined world is probably almost impossible. This idea of project that deals with a vast world is not new, if we remember the sentence – “from the spoon to the city” that was said by Gio Ponti in the 40s that was a repetition of the sentence in the 30s “from the pillow to the city” sad in the Bauhaus times, and a few decades later in Portugal by Fernando Távora,
“from the door handle to the city”. It was clear until the middle of the XX century this overall view of the discipline at different scales. These sentences synthetize and demonstrate what architects were doing, and aiming to do. The project was still the center, but the scales and the complexity, the culture, the connection with the society were there. Architecture is connected with society, so its natural development into a building design represents an act of celebrity, where the majority of the critical practices escape from the construction process, creating a kind of void. A silence of impotence. A tendency of no design, small scales or critical narrative to avoid the “hard”
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Images:
p. 87
Fall Map by Valerio Morabito mixed technique on canvas. Oslo – 2023.
