60
Landscape Architecture
REGGIO DI CALABRIA
Overview
Date/time interval
Syllabus
Course Objectives
In order to achieve the expected results for the proposed course program and experimentation, the educational offerings articulated in the different activities will pursue the following:
- The qualifying educational objectives will tend to implement the students' judgment, forcing them to make technical and cultural choices in full harmony with their abilities and interests. This path will enable them to center an intellectual autonomy within a level scientific community such as the university.
- The specific goals are to equip students with the ability to observe urban space, the empty space of the landscape and the objects that populate it. To understand how to represent space and ideas for urban landscape projects. To equip them with both theoretical and practical training tools related to landscape architecture and thus to landscape design.
Course Prerequisites
The following are required: basic knowledge of spatial design and representation.
For propaedeuticity refer to Article 19 of the Teaching Regulations
Teaching Methods
The students are expected to design an urban park, with the 80% of the area dedicated to reforestation and 20% dedicated to facilities – sports, recreational areas, cultural events. Required
- Model of study;
- Analysis of the site;
- Site plan;
- Systems drawings;
- N. 2 sections in 1:50 scale;
- Perspective and/or axonometric drawings.
Students will gain an understanding of the state of the discipline of landscape design through direct examples and by deepening complex reasoning across disciplines. Knowledge and understanding skills;
From this knowledge they will have to construct plausible scenarios for new ways of inhabiting the urban environment and its ecological, cultural and resilience needs;
Students will be expected to independently produce ideas that will be collectively analyzed and then methodologically addressed to build the tools needed to think about complex projects;
Each student should communicate his or her progress by adapting graphic representations with specific and timely references and citations;
By the end of the course, students should have completed a course of instruction that leads them to construct ideas in relation to their cultural choices and personal interests, so that they can elaborate an active, agile and modern knowledge path.
Assessment Methods
Verifica pre esame sul progetto previsto dal corso, attraverso l’elaborazione di layout specifici di rappresentazione del progetto.
(cfr art.14 regolamento didattico/obbligo di frequenza)
Modalità di svolgimento dell’esame: Teoria/Pratica
Qualifying educational goals will tend to implement students' judgment, forcing them to make cultural choices in full harmony with their abilities and interests. This path will enable them to center an intellectual autonomy within a level scientific community such as the university.
The specific goals are to equip students with the ability to observe urban space, the empty space of the landscape and the objects that populate it. To understand how to represent space and ideas for urban landscape projects. To equip them with both theoretical and practical training tools related to landscape architecture and thus to landscape design.
Texts
2020. Morabito V., The City of Imagination, ORO Edition, USA.
2020. Morabito V., Drawings vs. Photos in the representation of landscape architecture. In Ri-Vista n. 02.2020, University of Florence Press. Florence, Italy.
Hunt J. D., Sette lezioni sul Paesaggio. Liberia.
2019. Corner J., Taking measures across American Landscape. Yale University Press.
1968. McHarg I., Design with Nature.
2014. D’Angelo P., Filosofia del Paesaggio. Quodlibet
2005. Panzini F., Progettare la natura. Architettura del paesaggio e dei giardini dalle origini all’epoca contemporanea. Zanichelli
Contents
Building on the co-presence of the discipline of landscape architecture, the course aims to create those cultural and methodological conditions for building relationships with architecture, ecology and art.
During the semester, students will be stimulated through open discussions of modern and contemporary architectural and landscape architecture projects in which the creative and imaginative matrix is clear. How some of these projects, such as New York's Central Park, have been prescient of an increasingly pressing need to integrate design and ecology, design with resilience to mitigate climate change and its consequences. Particular attention will be paid to recounting how art has always played a prominent role in the culture of urban systems and place-making.
Students are expected to be very active while describing the projects through freehand drawings, pointed reflections and constructive reasoning.
The site of the project is a 18 hectares area within the city of Catania. In the last decades, this old abandoned agricultural field remained closed off inside the urban fabric of the city. The site is located in between Cibali’s neighborhood and Rapisardi’s neighborhood. Terracing and presence of “sciara” characterize the site. Sciara is a sicilian word that defines a precise kind of landscape in the Etna’s area, it is composed of an accumulation of volcanic scoria formed on the surface or in the sides of lava flowes. The project of this park aims to be part of a well-organized green system of the city.
Project exertions will take place in the classroom throughout the semester and will require an in-depth investigation ranging from the construction of an idea and its representation, from the drawing of a site plan to the different scales of design and concluding with a project section. This will be investigated at the different scales down to the details of the objects.
Site Issues
The Calopinace River, a waterway that flows through the central part of Reggio Calabria's urban fabric, fits into this context. The etymology of its name, a subject of debate, derives from the Greek kalòs pinax ("beautiful picture" or "fertile plain"), likely indicating the agricultural importance of the alluvial areas near its mouth during the Magna Graecia period. In the Middle Ages, it was also documented in the form "Alepò," indicating the historical continuity of the toponym.
The Calopinace played a decisive role in the urban evolution of Reggio Calabria. Settlements settled along its banks since the Greek colonization, and its presence influenced the layout of the main roads. However, recurrent floods, often devastating, also made it a risk factor: as early as the 17th century, historical
sources document destructive events that struck the lower city. After the 1908 earthquake, the new master plan for reconstruction (the so-called De Nava Plan) necessarily had to address the presence of the Calopinace, adopting hydraulic regulation and canalization solutions that profoundly altered its appearance.
An urban linear park for Calopinace river’s banks
From a landscape perspective, the river today represents an ecological and morphological break within the urban continuum, simultaneously a barrier because the banks are hidden and partially covered by a motorway, but it represents an high potential green corridor. Recent urban redevelopment projects, linked to the enhancement of the waterfront and the integration of natural systems, have highlighted the strategic value of the Calopinace as an environmental infrastructure, capable of combining the needs of hydrogeological safety, ecological restoration, and landscape enjoyment.
The Calopinace river embodies a paradigmatic case of the interaction between natural dynamics and urban development: from a hydraulic threat and a constraint on settlement, to a potential resource for a sustainable city model, capable of recognizing its defining geomorphological elements not as an obstacle, but as an opportunity for territorial regeneration.
In this context at the students will be required the creation of an urban linear park, as a new vision of the city, along the banks of Calopinace fiumara. The project aims to provide the city of an effective green area, to dismiss part of the motorway, to find innovative ways to capture subsoil and surface waters, to transform the area in a place entirely integrated with the urban tissue.
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