Punto, linea, superficie. Elementi formali per il design del verde

The vegetation is a fundamental element of architecture and a versatile and expressive building material: dynamic, alive, changing and unpredictable. These characteristics can improve the project, but they also are elements of banality and criticality, when you don’t know to forecast the needs and development along time. The art of gardening as an artificial arrangement of these elements, more or less formal, softens the architecture, integrating and merging with it, playing with the feelings and the symbolism. A deep substrate of traditions and cultures has led to the current conformations of vegetation ‘tamed’ to coexist with humans. The garden ‘speaks’ through its components and his language is related to the style of its construction: the project of vegetation communicates in the symbolic language of the built form. The combination of a given number of elements offers more meanings than the sum of the singles. Elements, structures and compositions are the three dimensional scales that build the grammar of this language. The green ‘bricks’, with their shape and color, are combined in horizontal or vertical, linear or spatial structures. They are composed according to the formal styles coded from the historical models. The dynamicity of the plants has enhanced agricultural techniques that aim to control their shape and growth in space and time, and to preserve special images: trimming (topiary), seeding and planting. The attempt to make the world of plants similar to the mineral one, transforming the vegetation in architecture, make the green forced by its spontaneous form to become a technological structure according to four degrees of freedom: natural green, shaped/sculpted (topiary), raised (biotettura), built. These forms will sum the ‘greened building’. Different styles of traditional arrangement of green spaces are coded for the functions of family and associated life, from pleasure or recreation to the celebratory, educational and moral intentions. They are patterned on historical models, but these are so consolidated as to become timeless and contemporary: the Formal and Picturesque garden and their variants, the materialization of the Sublime and Symbolic rhetorical figures, have their roots in Persian, Chinese and Greek ancient archetypes. The landscape as a ‘nature seen through a culture’, human work of art, has a vital role which goes beyond that of being the background of the architecture and it brings independent and complementary meaning. Emancipated from the myth of the return to nature, the green - in a positive and rational relationship with the nature itself - can and should be considered as a primary actor in establishing the space of daily living. The reading of the qualitative components of the vegetation, and its link with the architecture, allows to identify formal categories which exceed the schematic opposition nature/built, public/private, function/decoration. It extends the thinking from the styles of garden to the forms of the green, as an important element in the definition of urban form, and it goes back to the basic and fundamental concepts of architectural design.