Section Natural Intelligens. Curated by Carlo Ratti.

In line with the ambition to combat climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030, the EU has recently committed to planting 3 billion trees (see the EU Forest Strategy, 2021). On a global level, a number of cities have implemented reforestation programmes and urban greening initiatives. Within the framework of this vast and urgent commitment, the paper examines the emerging phenomenon of Tree Hubs, where unwanted trees and plants can be placed after harvesting and before replanting, with a particular focus on The Netherlands.

The pavement joint in urban spaces has, in recent years, become a controversial detail, particularly when unexpectedly colonized by wild plants and pioneer species. This article, however, highlights that this is not a spontaneous phenomenon but rather a process: the evolution of this overlooked interstitial space was revived during the immediate post-war period, when ecological awareness emerged globally. By considering examples such as the Ecokathedraal by Louis G. Le Roy, the Jardin des Joyeux by Wagon Landscaping (Paris, 2016), and Gilles Clément and Coloco’s urban regeneration project for the Manifatture Knos (Lecce, 2012–18), this investigation illustrates the transformative process of pavement joints. It emphasizes the relationship between inert matter, soil, and interstitial vegetation, while underscoring the increasing role of craft knowledge, collective practices, and the radicalization of the principle of minimal intervention.

In an era of globalisation, landscape architects and urban designers have learnt to think big: large-scale plans with far-reaching visions, saving the planet and solving urgent global challenges. Usually, we try to solve these problems in the same way that we created them: with advanced and generic technological methods, and with significant investments. Yet this bigness is still largely the domain of international players, and its effects do not necessarily foster the quality of urban spaces. On the other end of the spectrum is the small realm of a terrarium, intriguing because of the contradiction between their otherworldliness and the representation they offer of the world as we know it. They share this quality with gardens, described by Michel Foucault as “the smallest fragment of the world and, at the same time, represents its totality, forming right from the remotest times a sort of felicitous and universal heterotopia”1. What if we learned to think small again? What do small gestures have to offer to reveal what is valuable and meaningful and to foster a novel understanding of the relation between humans and nature? How can they sharpen our view for the particular, identifying the places in the landscape in their structural, material, dynamic, practical, atmospheric, mnemonic, and discursive identities? [...]

La parola “accumulazione”, dal latino accumulatio -onis, significa letteralmente raccolta, accatastamento, affastellamento di mate¬riale. In particolare, in geologia, il termine fa riferimento al pro¬cesso incessante di formazione di cumuli di detriti ad opera di agenti terrestri esterni. In ambito letterario l’accumulazione è una figura retorica, ovvero una metatassi che nasce dal mettere insieme una serie di termini, pensieri, immagini, stati d’animo – anche inconsci – accostati tra loro sia in modo ordinato e pro-gressivo, che in modo caotico, destrutturante. Vengono in mente, in ordine sparso, le accumulazioni lessicali di Petrarca, gli eccessi descrittivi di Rabelais, i monologhi di Joyce, le sequenze imma¬ginifiche dell’Ariosto. Quest’ultimo, in particolare, utilizza ardite accumulazioni di termini per trasmettere ritmicamente, oltre che semanticamente, un effetto di straniamento e per trascinare così il lettore in una foresta (sia immaginaria che verbale) di spa¬zi amplificati che si annodano e si aggrovigliano su loro stessi.

“Isolario Venezia Sylva” è un progetto dell’unità di ricerca dell’Università Iuav di Venezia svolto nell’ambito del programma Prin “Sylva – Ripensare la «selva». Verso una nuova alleanza tra biologico e artefatto, natura e società, selvatichezza e umanità”. Agli autori invitati è stato chiesto di sviluppare una riflessione progettuale per un’isola minore della Laguna di Venezia che è stata loro assegnata. L’esercizio, fondato sulla conoscenza della realtà e sulla prefigurazione dello spazio, è strutturato su quarantotto frammenti di terra e su quarantotto gruppi di progettazione di quindici diverse scuole di architettura italiane o studi professionali, è incardinato sui tre termini/temi “isola, architettura, selva”.

Exhibition curated by Sara Marini in the context of the PRIN "SYLVA - Ripensare la ‘selva’. Verso una nuova alleanza tra biologico e artefatto, natura e società, selvatichezza e umanità".

“Isolario Venezia Sylva” è un progetto dell’unità di ricerca dell’Università Iuav di Venezia svolto nell’ambito del programma Prin “SYLVA - Ripensare la ‘selva’. Verso una nuova alleanza tra biologico e artefatto, natura e società, selvatichezza e umanità”, curato da Sara Marini. La mostra itinerante raccoglie quarantotto indagini progettuali dedicate a quarantotto isole minori della Laguna di Venezia. Sedi: Venezia (Ca’ Tron - Iuav, 13/6-1/7/22), Treviso (Spazio Solido, 21/7-5/8/22), Genova (Cisternone galleria Gaspare de Fiore, 22/9-6/10/22), Firenze (Chiesa di Santa Verdiana - DIDA, 18/10-2/11/22), Napoli (Palazzo Gravina, 24/11-14/12/22), Roma (Sapienza, 19/01-2/03/23), Matera (Museo Archeologico Domenico Ridola-Museo Nazionale di Matera, 28/03-2/05/23), Pescara (Spazio Francesco Garofalo - Dd'A, 17/10-17/11/23), Ascoli Piceno (Sede dell'Annunziata - SAAD, 7/3-5/4/2024), Palermo (Dipartimento di Architettura, Università degli Studi di Palermo, 12/02-12/03/2025), Udine (Università degli Studi di Udine, dal 16 maggio al 13 giugno 2025).

A direct and empiric observation of landscape architecture interventions, from private gardens to public parks planned and realized in southern Switzerland between 2009 and 2018, has presented an opportunity to think about ground movements linked with the construction phases of landscape and architectural projects. [...]

Infrastructures as high-speed railways are a contemporary debated topic with political, economic and environmental impacts. In the Alpine arc alone, located in the heart of Europe, as of today six HSR lines are planned or have been realized.

Within this framework, the article probes the case of the New Rail Link through the Alps that connects Germany to Italy through Switzerland. This “Infrastructural Monument” in fact produces a number of ground movements that are affecting and shaping the ever-changing Swiss mountainous landscapes: millions of cubic meters of excavated material arising from tunnelling and construction activities are spread among the railway’s nearest territories.

What could be the role of design and landscape architecture? This research is intended as an instrument to deepen the design meaning of moving ground actions, reflecting on how, millennia after the first ancestral earth mounds, these monumental earthworks could today become part of a continuously renewed poetic imagination.

The post-industrial park is conceived as an exposition space that, thanks to a design concept and a project, includes a large part of land, where nature and wildlife are represented and exposed together with ruinous industrial buildings or, at the minimum, fragments of productive structures and factories. The feeling of the sublime that cross those parks does not have the contemplative and nostalgic character of Romanticism, the disruptiveness of the creative action of Land Art or the illusion of a potential salvation of the first post-industrial parks, but is rather based on the recognition of a subtle equilibrium among the fragility of anthropic artifacts and the landscape that hosts them.

Collective, democratic, alive, changeable and inclusive, Public Nature cannot be exhausted within a single reflection.

Precisely owing to its character, it is transformation and change, place of exchange and participation, an open space with boundaries dissolved between public and private spheres. These intrinsic features extended towards the idea of an open city spontaneously lead to the need to gather numerous professional experiences, but most importantly, personal and intimate relationships with a landscape that escapes purely aesthetic, picturesque and conventional logic, to instead be Public Nature, an inexhaustible process of becoming.