Marcello D’Olivo (1921-1991) is an atypical figure in the Italian architectural panorama of the twentieth century, essentially solitary and foreign to the schools of thought of his time. Central to his work is design and theoretical research in which technology, mathematics and nature converge, with the intention of outlining a new way of generating relationships between architecture and the environment. D’Olivo has in fact hypothesized a cultural hybridization between technology and nature inspired by cybernetics which finds, in the desire to overcome traditional dichotomous categories such as machine/nature, similarities with highly current themes such as posthumanist theories and the conceptualization of cybernetic landscapes. His prescient intuitions make the project a synthesis of cultural diversity inspired by the vision of a planet as a place of coexistence of “men, plants, animals and machines”, interesting to rediscover in light of the complexity of the contemporary world.
The article o!ers research notes and some hints on the definition of temporal diversity in the disci-plines related to landscape design. After having carried out a quick survey of the literature that in recent decades has dealt with exploring the issues related to the historical and temporal dimensions of landscapes, the essay explores the affinities between the theoretical and operational tools of ar-haeological sciences (in particular linked to the theme of context and stratigraphic investigations) and the ‘archaeological’ reading, as experimented by various authors in the field of landscape design. Reflecting on the concept of biological diversity and trying to reinterpret it according to a specifically design research dimension, the introduction of the term temporal diversity is proposed, to be understood as a variety of historical phases, evolutionary sequences, chronological documentation, visible or invisible, present or even just perceptible in a given open space or landscape context.
The paper starts from the opening of the new southern part of the Gulbenkian Foundation garden in Lisbon, in order to reflect on the legacy of the Portuguese landscape school, traditionally inclined to mixture. When, between 1959 and 1961, Antonio Viana Barreto and Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles drew up the design assumptions for the new park, they identified the ecological approach and the integration of existing vegetation as the main cornerstones. They also seek a strong visual continuity between the architecture and the outside, firmly renouncing any geometrical axis, preferring the design of space over the form, celebrating the intrinsic beauty of Nature; they created a park that has been called a ‘political flag’ on several occasions. The essay tries to critically analyse the outcomes of the competition announced in 2019 and won by Kengo Kuma (architecture) and Vladimir Djurovic (landscape architecture), who planned a nature garden with the features of an urban forest, integrating existing vegetation with Mediterranean species from Portuguese nurseries. The main topics are biological diversity, and the symbolic charge of several design choices, oriented towards inclusiveness and dialogue of the garden with the surrounding urban complexity.
This deliberately fragmented essay set out to reflect on the theme of refuge – or rather, the rethinking of an architecture of refuge – in the face of current trends of uninhabitability, genocide, and extinction. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben, Stefania Consigliere, Bifo Berardi, and Black Marxist anarchism, it aims to offer a fugitive architectural thought and a thought of fugitivity.
In the entropy of surface life, dominated by visible horizons, the potential and complexity of the underground are often overlooked. This subterranean realm, excavated and exploited over time, holds geological, semantic, and temporal stratifications.Through the exploration of a Slovenian mining landscape, shaped by the extraction of deposits with cultural, settlement, and economic influences, the profound connection between the surface layer and hypogeal reality emerges. The latter imposes a different grammar, dictated by conditions far removed from human habits, generating a wide range of perceptual alterations that, from an anthro-pocentric perspective, may render inhabiting these contexts extreme.However, a specialized biodiversity inhabiting in these environments testifies that such extremity is not absolute but may offer useful tools for landscape design to address the complexity of the dimension we live daily.
The aim of this paper is to reflect on the nature of the forest as a super-diverse open space capable of welcoming forms of community life usually reserved for cities. In fact, the forest can no longer be considered as misplaced in the urban environment, but rather as an integral part of its identity. The real purpose of this landscape, where many people live, will be explored, taking into account all those experiences in which it is the forest that opens up to the city and not vice versa. To this end, the privileged spaces for research will be civil forests (Olivetti, 2023); they are an active part of the relationships that take place in the urban environment and not at its service. There are places where the process of including the city in the forest is taking place. Even if these spaces have di!erent geographies and dimensions, it is the fact that they are outside the codified rules of use for exclusively anthropogenic environments that makes them unusual, valuable and fully functional.
Digital transition has introduced dynamics of everyday cohabitation and interaction between the organic dimension of living beings and the inorganic diversity of ‘sentient’ technological objects, able to record and react to biological behaviors. It is a phenomenon whose impact on ways of observing and designing the landscape is yet to be largely explored.The contribution reflects on the possibilities of using the computational capacity of digital technologies as allies for an open and adaptive project, capable of keeping together biological, cultural and social uniqueness and differences. To help reversing possible homologating impacts of globalisation, but also of digitalisation itself, if understood merely as a process of technical advance-ment pursuing optimisation logics, possible conceptual frameworks are proposed to imagine new relations with this technological otherness and to identify some trajectories useful to broaden the designer’s field of action.
I lemmi ‘diversità’ e ‘differenza’ costituiscono duttili strumenti concettuali a cui si è solitiricorrere per accompagnare percezioni, interpretazioni e rappresentazioni del mondo comeincessante divenire e come manifestazione di alterità, complessità, molteplicità.In particolare, un sostanzioso nucleo di locuzioni e neologismi ruota intorno alla parola‘diversità’, abbinata a un aggettivo qualificativo o a un prefisso che la connotano e laspecificano. È il caso del termine super-diversità, introdotto nel 2007 dall'antropologostatunitense Steven Vertovec per descrivere “la diversificazione della diversità” checaratterizza i movimenti migratori umani ai tempi della globalizzazione e che richiedono diessere indagati in una prospettiva di multifattorialità.Da quando è apparso, il vocabolo super-diversità ha avuto ampia diffusione nella letteraturascientifica. Trasportato fuori dal campo delle scienze sociali mantiene potenza semantica edevocativa, e si presta ad essere usato come chiave interpretativa per aprire riflessioni suquestioni emergenti della cultura del progetto contemporaneo di paesaggio.Questo monografico di Ri-Vista raccoglie contributi che consentono di rielaborare ilconcetto di super-diversità applicato alle scienze del paesaggio. Invita a ripensare cioè lasuper-diversità in termini di relazioni intrecciate e complesse tra organico e inorganico, tramolteplici agency, tra i differenti habitat, territori, ecosistemi e l’insieme delle popolazioni(umane, animali, vegetali) che li abitano, senza dimenticare i possibili aspetti conflittuali eproblematici insiti in tutte le dinamiche del vivente.
Considering the case of the Tempelhofer Feld in Berlin as a pretext, this essay suggests possible approaches to multispecies knowledge through visualization modes useful for cultivating forms of attention towards more than human agency and making entangled relationships legible to reanimate the landscape. This analysis is part of the doctoral research in the Landscape Architecture curriculum of the University of Florence. The essay explores the interconnections between biodiversity and the practices of care of the former airfield. The focus of the paper concerns three areas in particular: Alten Flughafen, the ruderal biotope located to the north; Wiesenmeer, the ‘sea of meadows’ enclosed between the two landing strips, and Vogelschutzfläche, the permanent ornithological reserve managed by extensive grazing. The visual methodology outlined in this essay can be used to analyze urban landscapes and the reciprocities that characterize them, using drawing as a tool of investigation, documentation and dissemination.
In light of the multiple crises that current society is facing, among escalating geopolitical tensions and increasingly allarming predictions on the e!ects of climate change, the article reflects on the significance of border landscapes, perceived not only as a spatial limit that divides countries. According to the so-called “Border Theory”, a border can be considered as an active process, that can separate as well as unify, or attract and repel. The article delves into the model of the cross-border park, paradigmatic of a border landscape conceived as a space where those same di!erences established and marked by the presence of a frontier can interconnect. Cross-border parks can o!er fertile grounds for a fruitful contamination of different cultures and different human or non-human life forms. Heterogeneous case-studies will be illustrated, where the project of a cross-border park can affect the surrounding territory by inhibiting relations between communities and landscapes, or instead promoting them, while experimenting new forms of intraspecific coexistence.
Kongjian Yu died on 23 September 2025 in a plane crash in a rural area near Aquidauana, in the Pantanal region of the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul. He was 62 years old and was in Brazil to attend the 14th International Architecture Biennial in São Paulo, which was being held at the time. Yu, universally recognised as one of the most influential and prolific landscape architects of the 21st century, was very important to Ri-Vista, not only for his participation in our scientific committee, but above all for his influence, which can be seen in many of our published contributions. With this short piece, we would like to remember him and thank him with esteem and affection, confident that his work will continue to permeate our design explorations.
The Open Sea is an Open Space but above all it is a place. Talking about lands is also talking about the sea, the sea that belongs to it and the territories that delimit its shores, because the sea is within our perception of the landscape up to the horizon and because from the horizon we are perceived as part of it: a liquid landscape that holds together the geography of heterogeneous cities, of fields and mountains, of coasts and depths. Special water is that between neighboring shores, between islands of the same archipelago, that of gulfs and straits, or even that drained and transformed into land. It is here that the landscape takes on the value of a liquid public space, it is here that the sea is not an interruption, it is not a silence but a continuity, according to a reversal of concept, from an ‘empty’ space to a place ‘full’ of sense and meanings. Hybrid and multiple places, for which the sea takes on - in the legitimacy of belonging to the land - the status of landscape. This is the case of the open sea that inhabits the Campania area of the Campi Flegrei.
The district of Aspern Seestadt, located north-east of Vienna, offers the opportunity for an in-depth reflection on the planning of new urban neighbourhoods in relation to the mitigation of the effects of the climate crisis and the need to ensure a lively and sustainable urban space. Focusing on the characteristics of open space, the article analyses the heat island mitigation guidelines that guided the design of the neighbourhood and the theories developed by Jan Gehl on ‘life between buildings’ and tries to verify their applicability to the design strategies of the parks implemented so far. The question arises as to whether the Aspern Seestadt project is really inspired by a sustainable urban design approach or whether, rather, an urban model is being pursued that guarantees reassuring, conflict-free, familiar, exclusive spaces (only for certain social groups), but which, in fact, generate a generic landscape.
Looking at all open spaces as public spaces, understood as our shared common good, and as complexity and temporality, we need to choose landscape as our lens. More precisely, landscape design, capable of creating a dialogue between the unpredictability of nature and the solidity of the city, history and the future, movement and stability.
This article takes inspiration from an experimental approach to research and teaching: the inventory of open spaces at the Ex Mattatoio in Rome, a former slaughterhouse that has been gradually transforming into a Città delle Arti since 1975. Seen through the combined perspectives of photography and urban studies, this site becomes emblematic for examining processes of decommissioning within the multi-scalar condition of the contemporary city. Looking at the practice of this inventory provides a theoretical reflection on the effects that urban regeneration processes—often lengthy and conflictual—have on the notion of “openness” associated with space. Conceived both as a portrait of places and as a project, the inventory becomes a tool for capturing uncertainty and the traces of relationships embedded in the city. When recalled, these traces can turn “openness” into a space for rights and diversity. How, then, can we preserve those margins of redundancy, genericities, flexibility, and freedom that keep open spaces truly open?
The urban forest is among the most widely adopted metaphors for the transformation of the city. To explore its potential, the ‘3-30-300’ rule induce more attention to urban tree planting, but also suggest the option of not increasing trees. The sole reference to what is above – tree component – is questioned. What is below – the soil – assumes a central position to analyse the forest-city relationship. This contribution explores the role of open spaces with organic soil but no measures to protect it assuming the city of Pistoia as a context for investigation. On a sample of three open spaces of this type the variation in canopy surface area is investigated with simulations based on three growth scenarios. The results are discussed in light of a projection on the scale of the urban agglomeration and a comparison with the tree cover of three existing parks. The modelling shows margins for increasing the tree component provision not in conflict with giving open spaces appreciable levels of morphological. The contribution highlights that the conservation and improvement of the soil of vulnerable open spaces has a strategic value for an urban forestry policy.
In its permanence over time, architecture welcomes variations in the meaning of places and the way of experiencing urban space in adaptation processes that, by realigning form and function in their ‘being in a place’, offer themselves to today’s need for living. This framework has explored how the dualism ‘silence / non-silence’ has characterised some of these processes and how, in its complexity, it has proved fruitful in the contemporary design of places of public life. Cases of transformation of buildings and open urban spaces, created to host forms of life in silence, into places of a non-silence respectful of the original vocation, have thus appeared of particular interest. They are new ‘urban rooms’ that take on new roles in the city, giving new meaning to the geometries desired by the ancient use model through acts of civitas and creativity.
This paper explores how urban gardening practices can serve as a tool to foster transcultural integration and support migrants in the process of redefining their identity in a new context. Through the shared care of a cultivated space, it is possible to overcome cultural barriers, fostering respect for differences while simultaneously creating a common ground for interaction, where newcomers and local communities develop a shared vision that can be extended to everyday life and public spaces. The transcultural gardens often develop in uncertain open spaces, which are therefore able to accommodate otherness and allow the emergence of alternative models of collective space. Through the analysis of established case studies, this paper highlights the different possibilities offered by these practices and demonstrates how these experimental spaces address the social and cultural needs of a global society, proposing a model of authentic integration based on dialogue and mutual respect.
