Iacopo Prinetti
Gardening Commons
Keywords
Community gardens, protest, identity, integration, collectives
Through a brief critical history of community gardens, the contribution looks at the garden as an ephemeral urban architecture, both to be collectively destroyed to change a paradigm and to be built together to affirm an identity. The text places this space at the center of the urban and social transformations of the last century by juxtaposing this vision of identity with an opposition, rooted in urban planting groups, to the idea of the city as a sphere of economic profit alone in favor instead of urbanity as a possible social place for marginalized communities. Identifying emblematic cases of urban gardens from the last century, Gardening Commons develops reflections on the value of these spaces as sites of protest and culture, as edens as much as ever cast in the reality of our times, particularly capable of raising battles and creating movements amidst the downfalls of modernity.
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Marco Marino
Carlo Scarpa. Towards a Climatic Architecture
Keywords
Carlo Scarpa, Riyadh, climatic architecture, Prince Fahad Al Saud, sustainability
Carlo Scarpa, while still completing the Tomb for Giuseppe and Onorina Brion in 1978, an "Isle of the Dead" à la Böcklin, designed a luxurious abode for Prince Fahad Al Saud in Riyadh, a garden of the living, an earthly paradise, the Persian pairidaēza, the sacred enclosure reserved for the elect: eden. Eden for Scarpa is a "well-being of water and space," built of precious and rare materials in which to enjoy the reflections of moonlight. Scarpa's Arab Eden is refined opulence. Scarpa has in mind Islamic castles, but also Byzantine art and especially Venice, which is a "dissymmetrical, high, low, crooked, straight" architecture, according to him perfectly approachable to the best Arab architecture. The Villa in Riyadh is also an opportunity to reflect around some unaccustomed design issues in Scarpa's production; this is perhaps an experiment toward a climatic architecture, an architecture that in the specific case of the Villa in Riyadh is adapted to the torrid climate of the Arabian desert.
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Luca Ruali, Anna Cecchin
A Nocturnal Garden
Keywords
Nightmare, dark eden, nocturnal, fear, landscape
A sequence of formal, emotional, luminous, and botanical elements constructs this idea of a nocturnal garden. The form of montage guides the reasoning and possible actual definition of a space shrouded in darkness. Weakly connected and discontinuous episodes avoid typological definitions, preferring to collect preparatory notes for design hypotheses. A palimpsest of deliberately ambiguous references unfolds along two lines. The first is a reconnaissance of realized night gardens or scenarios identifiable as such; the second is an inventory of not exclusively botanical elements attuned to the atmospheres and emotional conditions sought. Design experiences from different eras, photographic surveys, inventories of nocturnal and childhood fears, and natural species are elements chosen in different and distant contexts and then considered as found footage. The nocturnal garden is another chance to get to know a place-familiar in its daytime version made up of plant and animal presences-that appears changed in its appearance and the feelings it arouses, in its nocturnal version. The nocturnal, as in music, refers to the emotions hidden by the events of the day. The garden at night changes its appearance, producing different sounds, smells and atmospheres; darkness alters its forms. It is a time of stillness and dreams, but also of darkness and nightmare scenarios.
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Francisco Portugal and Gomes
Whoever Draws Is Still in Paradise
Keywords
Design, Joaquim Vieira, project, Alberto Carneiro, Portuguese architecture
The reference to paradise, sin, and leaving paradise appears in the book O Desenho e o Projecto São o Mesmo? Outros Textos de Desenho (Are Drawing and Design the Same? Other Texts on Drawing) by Joaquim Vieira, a graduate in Painting, the most prolific theoretician and pedagogue of drawing in Portugal. The book is a seminal work for the Porto School after the April 25, 1974 revolution and includes a set of texts Vieira wrote between 1985 and 1994. It consists of two parts. The first is the essay Vieira submitted to FAUP in 1994 when he applied to become an associate professor; the second, Outros Textos de Desenho, contains four chapters. The essay in the first part of the book is structured into five sections and a conclusion. The last section, titled What Separates or Unites Them, is composed of a set of sequential reflections raised by arguments placed in opposition to each other; for example, while on the one hand 'those who draw are still in Paradise. Art, drawing, is an activity, I might say, prior to original sin,' on the other hand 'design is the essence of cultural activity, it is desire, and it comes after leaving heaven.' This separation is rooted in the umbilical link of the Beaux Arts between architecture and the plastic arts and recalls visions of heaven and hell, temptations and sins.
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Marco Cillis
Building Around a Tree. The Leonardi-Stagi Alternative for the Extension of San Cataldo Cemetery in Modena
Keywords
Landscape, cemetery, Cesare Leonardi, Franca Stagi, funerary architecture
The paper discusses the design proposal that Cesare Leonardi (Modena, 1935-2021) and Franca Stagi (Modena, 1937-2008) submitted to the competition for the expansion of the San Cataldo cemetery in Modena, to investigate a design theme to date unexplored within the production of the professional association between the two. The result is a reflection on the progressive impoverishment of the role, compositional and symbolic, of vegetation in Italian funerary architecture: the Elysian Fields are elsewhere and Eden is only a literary tópos. The design for the Modena competition is antithetical (and anti-monumental) to the winning design by Aldo Rossi and Gianni Braghieri. The ordering element of the composition is the tree, around which a modular system containing burials is consolidated: a checkerboard of trees that determines a resilient organism, multipliable over time, capable of connecting the city of the dead with the city of the living and with territorial matrices.
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Nick Roseboro
A Playground as a Site of Reality
Keywords
Heterotopia, utopia, desire, device, play
Society has always had a complex relationship between work and leisure and inclusion in a cyclical system in which technological advances define many attributes. The characteristics of society help shape, define and historicize the spatial qualities of our lives and the experiences within them. In this context, festival space and its devices are essential to transform individual and communal aspects of perception. This contribution is a means to trace relationships within an idea of technologically mediated society, utopia, desire and necessity, mapping the imaginary onto real-life examples that become tools for play beyond the normality or stagnation of the world. The large-scale project The Playground, designed by Architensions and realized in 2022 for the Coachella Festival, is an example of experimenting with the subjectivities of homo ludens, utopia and desire in the land of momentary paradise.
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Niloofar Amini
Pairidaeza. On The Concept of Paradise in Iranian Art and Architecture
Keywords
Iran, paradise, enclosure, urban space, public space
The term "paradise," originating from the ancient Persian word pairidaeza, encapsulates the concept of a walled enclosure, often associated with pleasure parks and gardens of delight. Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the term "paradise" has been used to describe various architectural types, including walled parks accessible only to women, such as the Women Paradise, and shopping malls. Although they share terminology with the traditional notion of "paradise," these spaces differ significantly in conveying a sense of bliss. They highlight the existence of apolitical residents who remain disconnected from the public sphere. This division between public and private spheres has deep historical roots in Iran. However, by addressing the challenges arising from the historical continuity of the country's social structures, diverging from tradition and expanding the concept of pairidaeza, some contemporary Iranian architects build the potential for the creation of semi-public spaces. In this way, they transcend the previous fragmentation of private domains and illuminate an ongoing struggle to reclaim public spaces in the face of difficult sociopolitical circumstances. Through the transformation of social narratives, they provide a solid basis for reorganizing traditional or forgotten elements into new configurations, thus reshaping the narrative and potential of urban spaces.
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Claudia Oliva Saavedra
Nocturnal Traces. A Journey to the Post-dictatorial Clandestinity of Santiago de Chile
Keywords
Santiago de Chile, post-dictatorship, clandestinity, nocturnal, chronicle
On September 11, 1973, a military regime under Augusto Pinochet began in Chile. Until its end, the city of Santiago experienced a transformation marked by cultural control, censorship and terror. The victory of the "No" vote in the 1988 plebiscite and the return to democracy were highly anticipated as a respite for a dumbed-down city. Against this backdrop, since 1995, Chilean writer and artist Pedro Lemebel has written a series of urban chronicles chronicling this period from the perspective of marginality, showing an exacerbated class tension with the regime. His chronicles explored clandestine landscapes where pleasure was found in the midst of regime repression, characterized by experimentation and transgression of linguistic norms. Pedro Lemebel's chronicles became a literary cartography that explored life in the invisible city of Santiago, defying boundaries and representing an alternative reality in post-dictatorial Chile.
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