Grammatica di un paesaggio

The grammar of a landscape. Behavioural codes for the project, i.e., the project as a tool. The compositional features of the ‘countryside’ create a system of formal relations, a fabric of spatial links that need to be interpreted and described. We can learn about the compositional grammar of the ‘landscape of urban sprawl’ from the signs and graphics that determine several basic rules of the territory where they are located. In an attempt to provide tools to establish a design approach, we looked for an unexpressed subtext useful to extrapolate, if not the ‘settlement principles’, at least the legitimate, transmissible criteria regarding a common spatial regulation between the imagined city and the countryside. In an attempt to describe and exploit several unique topological traits required to achieve our goal we refer here to three metaphors: homology, analogy and heteronomy. By exhibiting what is invisible we wish to establish several thought processes and identify a behavioural design code. Morphological limits are our local ‘boundary’ that includes the agricultural farmland in the two valleys at the foot of Monte Calvo and extends north to the double linear border created by the Casali settlement and the upper orographic ridge, the Fosso Riana. The expressive values and proportions of the different spatialities of the topological data is the real object, the reference material where the layout of the land is recorded as visual characterisation signs; this layout is either created by the variables associated with properties, cultivations and mobility networks, or by local spatial structures which still maintain the original traits of the orographic surface. The work method includes graphic narrations and descriptive compilations as an initial starting point for future designs. We certainly do not intend to present a finalised methodology, or prefigure an organic intervention plan that systematically and comprehensively describes architectural issues or formalises the solutions. We are not referring here to a quick project that produces an end result, but to the conditions which in the long term designate a verifiable process which any protagonists, future designers, can use in separate and distinct periods of time. Reference to the spatial nature of geographic voids shifts our attention from the form of the object, from the traditional figures of ‘defined, canonical’ architecture, to the perception of relationships in topological space. To control the latter we need “to use new tools and focus more on forms and their composition, on the emptiness of relationships and correlations. In other words, to accept an intrusive and yet open compositional model”. The narrative fabric that leads to form, the behavioural code that justifies the changes from one place to another, make the design process similar to the work of a translator. However neither should aspire to be invisible. A designer’s strategy, like that of a translator, is to domesticate and at the same time disconnect because in both cases designers and translators have to betray the original ‘text’ and convey it in another language. The search for a grammar common to both the describable traits of the landscape and the topological units used in country living is exemplified in the images, graphic tables and descriptions provided here. The drawings and the work to re-elaborate and assemble the perceptive materials of empty agricultural space should be considered in unison with the literary descriptions expressed as comments. The latter is a dual linguistic and graphic scale, a heuristic strategy influencing relevant design behaviour.