Per una ‘poesia dell’acqua’. Progettare paesaggi fluviali urbani

Abstract

Water in its many forms has always fascinated designers for its ductility and ability to create innumerable landscapes, as variable as its own drops which, according to recent studies, are no longer as identical as we have thought up to now. Paraphrasing Susan and Geoffrey Jellicoe, this article “deals with the poetry of water in the making of landscape and architecture” (Jellicoe, 1971, p. 9). It is just to define that “poetry of water” that we reflect, obviously without the pretension of imitating the great masters, with particular attention to the urban context. We reflect on the changing and dynamic nature of river landscapes and its transversal pulsating depth which is of relationships with the urban texture; on the need of a network, imagined as two-colored (green and blue); on the importance to read the traces and reinterpreting them in a poetic key, making water emerge as an active component within the urban body. These are only some suggestions, such as notes in the designer’s notebook for a landscape-oriented project for the urban river landscapes.