The Creative Time of Gardens: From Microcosm to Landscape Infrastructure (original) (raw)

Di Lauro, A. (2024). The Creative Time of Gardens: From Microcosm to Landscape Infrastructure. In: Agnoletti, M., Dobričič, S., Matteini, T., Palerm, J.M. (eds) Cultivating Continuity of the European Landscape. Environmental History, vol 15. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25713...

The accelerated rhythms of the Internet’s world greatly affect the contemporary space which consequently has become more fluid and mutable. Landscape reflects the complex transformations of our time, identifying metamorphosis and dynamism as values: an "aesthetics of a creative time" that has always been the expressive tool, essential and intentional, of the landscape project. Landscape changes through biological and social times: today it reveals a mixture between fast events of society and slower evolution of places, due to the nature and the human work. The interpretation and the arrangement of the landscape transformation is a central issue to prefigure sustainable scenarios through a shared vision of the future. The large scale projects, marked by sprawling area and long times, are often asynchronous respect to the rapidity of global changes; instead, the garden offers the possibility of keeping up with the “temporal and space compression" of the world. The garden is a "microcosm" in which short and long times of the landscape - the immediacy of daily life, the slower transformations of territories, the perpetual renewal of nature - converge and amplify themselves in a narrative of symbols and metaphors. Here, more than elsewhere, the “contemporaneity” - as temporal span of human life - expresses itself as landscape, in complex relationships of past, present and future. In every time and place, the garden, while satisfying the needs of its own society, represents a "laboratory of thought" that anticipates ideologies, culture, technologies by which inhabitants relate themselves to the environment and perceive it as landscape. Thus, it is a place where collective stories, urban conflicts and social aspirations, meet each other. Here, the project issues can be reconsidered and combined with a design language able to express the social values. This paper addresses how the garden as an “ethical-aesthetic image” may reveal future scenarios of transformation on a larger scale. The garden’s project is considered as a field test, i.e. a "minimum landscape" that, even if punctual and short-term, anticipates wider and long-term strategies. It is closed and fenced by definition, but open and dynamic at the same time and able to exchange information with the outside. Nowadays, it allows us to direct the creative action of time on the open landscape infrastructures, with an integrated vision across different scales.