Castiglion Fiorentino Heuristic Histories Robin Slovak
California Polytechnic University Pomona Landscape Architecture Study Abroad Santa Chiara, Fall 2016
Table of Contents Chapter 1 Walkscapes Castiglion Fiorentino Rome
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Chapter 2 Gardens and the Larger Landscape Castiglion Fiorentino Pienza
12-13 14-15
Chapter 3 Grafting the Edelweiss onto Cactus Plants Castiglion Fiorentino Florence
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Chapter 4 History of Landscape Nostalgia Castiglion Fiorentino Berlin
24-25 25-26
Chapter 5 Defining Urban Sites Castiglion Fiorentino Siena
30-31 32-33
Chapter 6 Defining the Urbanistic Project Castiglion Fiorentino Berlin
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Walkscapes Careri Francesco
When I walk without destination, I create my own path. I diverge from the path and I create “My own path going nowhere,� which allows me to experience landscape different from others. My findings of veering off the path this quarter have led me to piecing together clues about Castiglio Fiorentino and Rome which are both so deeply rooted in its historical vernacular.
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“Things don’t fall into ruin after they are built, but rather rise into ruin after they are built.” – Robert Smithson
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Castiglion Fiorentino
Castiglion Fiorentino has its main attractions and monuments such as the Cassero and the Logge del Vasari to which the average person are the terminus where their paths lead. But while Castiglion progresses, the new and old clash as modern monuments begin to take form. Unlike many Italian towns, Castiglion was rather laid out with a degree of entropy, facilitating wandering and getting lost. My path led me to find the loss of the former space which now has the given name of Piazza Garibaldi. The town has a dialogue of walking back through time, but upon entering the Piazza, the past becomes blurred. Most walk right by and don’t give it due justice. With no circulation setup in the piazza, one must make their own entry
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point. I walked the perimeter of the hillside on Monte Castiglion Maggio, which has layers of sedimentary history that literally covered the now flat piazza. The hillside used to shoot right into the town, now what is left is a hillside restricted to give space for an asphalt eyesore. Here is hidden the buttress to which a Roman aqueduct used to lay and lead into the tower across the piazza. Torn down to make the piazza in 1874, the remains of the aqueduct is its former structure with modern pipes running down it and a hole in the wall where it ran. This difference among how the water used to be channeled and currently is, encapsulates the difference among aesthetic through time. I learned to use walking as a research tool and to look back in time to give a place deeper meaning.
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Rome
Rome, a city with no grand transportation system, becomes a city where people make their acquaintance with it through walking. Differing from Castiglion, Rome has a myriad of monuments that one literally doesn’t have to plan which way they walk because they will always run into a focal point. This goes back to how the Romans designed the city using axis to align places of significance, rather than a more disorganized Castiglion. Instead of walking with iPhone maps in hand, the predictability of coming across something worth seeing let my navigational senses go free and I was off. Rather than being led around the city by a tour guide like lost sheep, leading
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and losing yourself through your own walk makes for a richer understanding of the city. Rome is prone to change for contemporary works more so than Castiglion. The sense of walking back through time is blended rather well in Rome, for one moment a 2000 year old structure holds your attention and right around the corner a Zaha Hadid building brings you back to 2016. I believe Castiglion should learn to embrace this type of experience of walking for contemporary change has the capacity to create great places. Make interesting places old or new and people will walk to them. I understood and measured Rome by giving my walks aimlessness and dislocation, rather than destination and location.
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Gardens and the Larger Landscape David Leatherbarrow
The author posits 4 distances (horizontal, vertical, geographical, technological) that exist as a means to measure a gardens distance from its larger landscape. Every garden should exhibit at least one of the four through its characteristics, otherwise there is a disconnection from the landscape.
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“Although the garden cannot be equated with the landscape, it cannot be separated from it either.” – David Leatherbarrow
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Castiglion Fiorentino The town itself doesn’t contain very many ‘gardens’, in my definition of the term. The author says a garden is really just some form of enclosure in the landscape, so with this I focused on an enclosure in Piazza Garibaldi. It is a depressed, walled off space with 3 Holly Oaks providing an overhead plane. I found this space to hold a special connection to the valley by using a vertically positioned space to view a vast horizontal distance. There are views framed by architecture all through the town to the valley at different points of enclosure, but this space has the idea of framing views using actual plant material from the larger landscape. I found it profound being able to focus on
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the foreground trees, but then being able to look past, out into the landscape beyond and focus my attention to it. One can make their own connections and relationship to a garden and its surroundings if the place has the ability to convey one of the distances.
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Pienza
Pienza has gardens that converse with the larger landscape using all four distances. The one garden I found most thought provoking was the Piccolomini Gardens. It uses the vertical garden similarly to Castiglion Fiorentino, but to me carried a very different dialogue. This garden is very rational, symmetrical, and groomed. At first glance this seems the anithesis of its larger landscape. Don’t be so quick to judge! Really look at the landscape. It is a very rational parceling of crop lands. These fields are symmetrical in their organization with vast rows of olives and vines. These fields are very well looked
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and cared after and are constantly being groomed to look and function the same. The garden is equated with the landscape here. Although they make look different and serve different functions, I find these two have more in common thatn difference.
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Grafting the Edelweiss on Cactus Plants Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto
Grafting is the placing one plant onto another so the inserted plant grows off of the other. This may not always work because not all plants may be compatible and sometimes attempting it may be harmful. This concept applies to a garden, in that applying a national type to a garden is an act of futility. This poses a problem in the form of a question, ‘Where are you?’ If all gardens in Italy are based off a Medici Florentine type, then a place and site is unspecific and its identity becomes unoriginal and shrouded. In order to move a place forward without destroying the history, a place needs to maintain and possess an individual identity, not a grafted one.
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“The modern Italian garden does not exist.� -Carlo Mercatelli
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Castiglion Fiorentino Castiglion was no exception to the fascism in Italy. On the subject of design, Fascism is an issue because what it does is eliminate creativity and control the design process. Though it lies in Tuscany, a region renowned for its Italian gardens and villas, Castiglion Fiorentino itself does not have a rich garden history. Most open space in town was left for communal gathering spaces that weren’t well defined or enclosed. It wasn’t until fascism entered the town in the 1930’s that certain places gained a typical Florentine garden layout. Piazza Vittorio Emanuele formerly was an open and very empty piazza with a few trees and benches lining its edges. I argue it wasn’t thought out, it lacked perspective and pictoral attributes and was barely designed. The way circulation was laid out in Renaissance gardens are primarily what gives them their rational and formality. Present day the piazza has a formal layout,
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similar to what I have experienced at other Italian villas. The oblong shape of the space received a main axis, defined edges through decorative circulation paths, and wide gravel paths. It acquired focal points, a place to terminate views and interest towards. Water features were big in the Renaissance age, lo and behold the piazza now has a sculptural central fountain. The sense of time and identity in this piazza are fixed in a time and period that it never existed in.
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Florence
The garden that is Boboli Gardens is the epitome of Renaissance gardens. With the idea of the fascists studying and analyzing Renaissance gardens in order to be able to copy them, it helps to understand what actually did make these places what they are. Upon traveling to many gardens throughout the land, this one was the first one I had seen and it left a lasting impression and understanding of the values and qualities of a Renaissance landscape. Its scale is grander than most gardens and has a complex topography scheme, but those were site conditions that were dealt with. The garden uses two main axis which both terminate into a fountain. There is a plethora of art displayed, considerably stone sculptures and fountains.
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There is great devotion to detail from stairs to handrails. Above all it captures the idea of perspective, using long and tall corridors to create frames of which to view horizontally in the garden and as well outward toward Florence. It has the standards of a Renaissance garden, but is that truly its identity? The garden began construction in the late 1500’s, but continually underwent hundreds of years of enlargement until mid-17th century. So while scholars can depict and analyze this garden for being a Renaissance garden, its identity was forged and manifested through periods of the Mannerist and Baroque, creating the presence of a unique Italian style.
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The Use of History in Landscape Nostalgia Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto
Nostalgia is a thought process intrinsically tied to places. A place’s identity is fashioned by all the past memories that occurred there. Through traveling Europe, I came across places all through time. Each contained its own nostalgic mode and conditions, but while some embrace it, others attempt to defy it.
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“The past is made to dialogue with the present.� -Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto
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Castiglion Fiorentino
Castiglion was no exception to the fascism in Italy. On the subject of design, Fascism is an issue because what it does is eliminate creativity and control the design process. Though it lies in Tuscany, a region renowned for its Italian gardens and villas, Castiglion Fiorentino itself does not have a rich garden history. Most open space in town was left for communal gathering spaces that weren’t well defined or enclosed. It wasn’t until fascism entered the town in the 1930’s that certain places gained a typical Florentine garden layout. Piazza Vittorio Emanuele formerly was an open and very empty piazza with a few trees and benches lining its edges. I argue it wasn’t thought out, it lacked perspective and pictoral attributes and was barely designed. The way circulation was laid out in Renaissance gardens are primarily what gives them their rational and formality. Present day the piazza has a formal layout, similar to what I have experienced at other Italian villas. The
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oblong shape of the space received a main axis, defined edges through decorative circulation paths, and wide gravel paths. It acquired focal points, a place to terminate views and interest towards. Water features were big in the Renaissance age, lo and behold the piazza now has a sculptural central fountain. The sense of time and identity in this piazza are fixed in a time and period that it never existed in.
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Berlin
In contrast to Castiglion, Berlin’s use of nostalgia is drastically different. Before WWII, Berlin had a history to celebrate, a nostalgia of places to celebrate. Now nostalgia and WWII in Berlin are typically concepts best not put together, but it is significant to understand that Berlin didn’t go back to its historic ways of building and rather progressed through modern design. The city sustained so much damage and chaos, that it was a shadow of its former self. Post war, everything had to be recreated, houses, restaurants, parks, churches, etc. There was so much opportunity to change the face, the identity of Berlin that now Berlin is known for being extremely contemporary. The city did not lose all of
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its history to the bombings. Those places that survived, now meld with the contemporary and are places of great importance to Berliners. The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Breitscheidplatz, is an example of keeping a nostalgic identity. The area was bombed in 1943 and the church suffered damages. It still sits there today with the damage as a symbol of the bombings that took place. The churches context was devastated, making it a recent part of Berlin’s development. A new church was designed around it and it encloses the old church ruins. Originally the Church was to be demolished, but public arguments saved it from devastation. By leaving the church there rather than destroying it, gave the place not only a nostalgic worth but as well the importance of past and present coming together to create new places.
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Defining Urban Sites Andrea Kahn
Defining urban sites with a set of concepts is an archaic attempt to classify all urban sites into certain categories. This, in my opinion, is limiting because every site is vastly different from one another and carries its own unique identity. This identity is defined by the intersection and overlay of multiple factors in a physical place.
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“They offer up myriad dimensions for consideration (economic, social, historical, physical, political, haptic), each of which situates the Site within a web of specific associations.� -Andrea Kahn
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Castiglion Fiorentino Piazza Garibaldi is limited from its context by multiple factors. It is on the edge of the urban center, walled off from all activity. It serves as transportation to unload passengers and pass traffic through. It has limited views out into the surrounding valleys. Even its boundaries aren’t well defined and bleed out into its context. At first glance it was my contention that this landscape was suffering and its lack of connection to its context was the root cause. The author claims that, “urban sites present designers with shifting and potentially conflicting identities,” this makes the act of defining a space with one identity difficult. The piazza never possessed one identity, but it has been formed through time. Piazza Garibaldi’s identity is in fact shaped by its context through economic, social, historical, and physical associations. The piazza has always been empty, but filled with physical and cultural events to give it
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an identity. The weekly market activates the piazza and brings it to life through economic and social uniqueness. People spend money in a space that was not intended to be economically upbringing. On top of that, the market brings people together to discuss, to eat, to experience the piazza in a new light. Rather than passing by the piazza, one actually passes through it! As for historically, the piazza is completely filled one weekend in June for the Palio dei Rioni. It becomes the place for historical celebration and invites its context to celebrate the piazza’s culture with it.
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Siena Another site of contextual complexity lies in Siena, Piazza del Campo. A site that is physically more detached from its context, in comparison to Piazza Garibaldi, but no less defined by its identity. The Piazza functions similarly with economic, social, historical, and physical components, but specific to its location in the city. Physically the piazza conforms to the topography of the city; giving it an unusual slope. Orientation and entry play a key role into how context enters the piazza. It is placed far downhill, with 9 different streets that lead into the piazza, making it very likely that a person will find themselves led into it. These openings into the piazza as well serve to frame views outward into the larger landscape. More than anything, emphasis is put on the sky and sun. These two contextual features drive the use of the space because shadow and light are ever shifting. where people situate themselves. The shops that
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encircle the piazza act as a means to bring in customers and tourists, but as well shops near the locale lead people toward the piazza. This place becomes a big social interaction of a continuous use of the ground plane. Rather than finding a lawn or bench in another area of the city, the piazza draws people in to lie on hard paving. Historically this space as well has a Palio dei Rioni. This brings people in from all over the world to witness this event.
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Defining the Urbanistic Project Joan Busquets
This chapter reflects upon the 10 taxonomies that define urban projects. Not every city and urban design falls under all 10 categories, rather it is specific to each place, therefore a few of the taxonomies directly apply to a project.
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“Cities, after having been ostracized by their deployment of functionalist urbanism in the postwar years, are experimenting with an unprecedented level of transformation and rehabilitation. In recent decades urbanism has been able to redeem itself from the general perception that urban transformation meant spatial and environmental poverty.” –Joan Busquets 35
Castiglion Fiorentino
Three of the taxonomies apply to Castiglion Fiorentino: Core Retrofitting, and Analog Compositions. ‘Core Retrofitting’ discusses updating historic areas without completely altering the city’s identity. This taxonomy correlates with our design project this quarter because that is exactly what Castiglion Fiorentino needs. It is a delicate topic in this town to change historic parts in order to accommodate the present, but certain issues require it. The new road that is being built to connect to the town center will greatly benefit all traffic in the town. However at what cost does this come? A great portion of a massive historic olive grove was decimated in order to install the road. One must weigh the odds and benefits in order conclude on how to retrofit cities sensitively. ‘Analog Compositions’ discourses that the master plan should
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not be the means by which to plan a city, rather by the accumulation of small scale projects to make a city. Castiglion is already on that path as the city has many small projects all over the town to help physically and politically structure the town. Having spent so much time in Piazza Garibaldi, I took interest in the cities future plan for it. It is a relatively small project that doesn’t require the town to change. They propose for the market to permanently be fixated in the empty parking lot space and put in new residential housing into the cliff face. This small intervention will blend in and not disrupt the cities overall identity.
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Berlin
In berlin I came across one taxonomy: Recycled Territories. ‘Recycled Territories’ proposes the idea of intervening on land that currently serves no purpose and restructuring it to serve a new purpose. Berlin has a lot of residual train tracks that cover miles of the city. With newer and more efficient trains put into place, the old tracks were abandoned and grew into a forest. The city saw this territory as an opportunity to recycle the former train tracks and make it into a recreation park. There are more than one of these in Berlin, but the one that stood out to me was the Naturpark in Schoneberg. The entry to the park is through the entrance of the currently used S-Bahn. That threshold of old to new had a powerful impact. As you progress through the site, the sound of the new train echoes through the park, making the experience of walking along train tracks like walking back in time.
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