Design a Mountain, a Valley, an Island, a Forested Plain… (a speech for symbiotic landscapes)

This paper is part of the Compilation of Proceedings from the International Scientific Conference "Coloquio 1: Beyond" of the 5th UDesign InternationaI Series held at UDEM, CRGS in 2014. The essay focuses on the possibility of a ‘symbiotic landscape’ composed of natural and artificial features in mutual beneficial exchange, where ‘landscape’, as a semantic extension of ‘territory’, refers to a delimited system of tangible and intangible surroundings and also to the cultural construct that contains it. The pursue of an alternative vision incorporating flora, fauna and collective forms of human dwelling in a virtuous non-parasitic ecosystem, aims to reposition from the ‘eco-friendly’ and ‘smart’ retrofitting of the obsolete shells of the urban past to the symbiotic reinvention of the relationship between human person and environment. A similar perspective originated Esperide, a project for the ‘artificial’ creation of a replicable ‘natural’ island 4 km off the Adriatic coast, illustrated in the essay. Esperide envisions the spontaneous development of marine eco-systems on a catalyzing artificial spine engrafted in the sea-bed, originating a symbiotic landscape of natural and artificial features. Embodied in a contained engineerable environment, it prospects an invitro experiment on a highly simplified system, meant to help cast more complex symbiotic scenarios of in-vivo implementations into an undefined future. The purpose is not that of seeking practical strategies to enhance the sustainability of the present order of thing, but rather that of questioning at its base the necessity of a city and the natural/man-made dichotomy and, further, that of casting a glance over a possible benign cyber-landscape which may encompass human dwelling scenarios apart from the mediation of architecture.