Il cosmo, il luogo. Le molteplici dimensioni del progetto di paesaggio

(originality)The article investigates Alexander von Humboldt’s role in contemporary thinking about the conceptual categories and operational tools of landscape design. (metodology) Humboldt’s work contains two basic insights that anticipate some of the themes characterizing the contemporary idea of landscape. The first can be traced back to the concept of multidimensional geographic space, which cannot be all mapped but should be studied through a multiscalar and multidisciplinary approach. The second lies entirely in the dual significance of geographical inquiry, which must be carried out simultaneously on the conceptual level and on the sensitive-visual level, through the direct experience of field survey. For Humboldt, as well as for landscape design, different phenomena coexist in the whole of the transformation processes of a place, which are the always unstable result of the relationships between visible and invisible, macroscopic and microscopic elements. The space of the landscape is inhabited, traversed, modified, cultivated, constructed and devastated not only by hu mans, but also by animals and plants: multiple events and trajectories imprint on terrestrial environments the traces of different living beings. In this interweaving of dynamics, time plays an essential role, as a measure of spatial relations and transformations that always raises the question of survival and erasure of living things, of the inertia and transformation of the elements that constitute physical space. (impact) All these issues are central to discussing – today – the positioning of landscape architecture within the processes that, between nature and culture, make life on Earth possible or impossible. The text also focuses on the representational techniques used by Humboldt, outlining similarities and differences with mapping discipline, as defined by James Corner a few years ago and now widely used in the most advanced landscape design experiences.