Manfredi, F. (2014), Linearscape meaning of a path in landscape, Firenze: Altralinea edizioni

fabio manfredi

LINEAR SCAPE Meaning of a path in landscape

Copyright Š 2014 by ALTRALINEA Edizioni srl Via P.L. da Palestrina 17/19 rosso – Firenze +39 55 333428 info@altralinea.it www.altralineaedizioni.it All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Digital Edition: october 2014 ISBN 978-88-98743-21-6

fabio manfredi

LINEAR SCAPE Meaning of a path in landscape

CONTENTS 5

Acknowledgements

7

WALK PLAN

14 PATH i.e. LINE 21 PATH i.e. ARTWORK 21 Fact and act 24 Object and place 26 Experience

A line made by walking Sixteen Steel Cardinal Spiral Jetty

35 PATH i.e. LINEARSCAPE 40 Line with view 49 Network path

Anyang Peak Red Ribbon / Bunker 599

61 The beaten path High Line / Garden of 10.000 Bridges 77 Path of least resistance 86 Path to recovery 91 References 94 Notes

Moses Bridge

From Reggio Calabria to Delft via Messina-Salerno 390 hours at 5km/h 2,153 km This route crosses through multiple countries.

From Delft To Rome via SS9 330 hours at 5km/h 1,588 km This route crosses through multiple countries.

Acknowledgements

This short essay is an abstract of a research work made up between Italy and Netherland, between University Mediterranea of Reggio Calabria and Delft University of Technology.

First of all, I would like to thank who walked with me along this path, that is, my supervisors RenĂŠ van del Velde and Daniela Colafranceschi. I would like to thank them for the spirit of venturing themselves in rarely-beaten paths.

I would like to thank those special persons that have often followed me, with the risk of getting lost: Corrado, Maurizio, Daniela, Stefano, Raffaella, Alessandra, Paola.

At last I would like to thanks who has colored this essay with amazing images: Cris Benton, Cody & Jen Morgan, Simon Johansson, JĂśrn Schiemann, David Berkowitz, Julie Akers, Jeremi Bigosinski (Rem), the architectural firms RO&AD architecten and Turenscape.

5

WALK PLAN

Walking attaches special meaning to the landscape and for this reason the issue involves more and more fields of knowledge. From the world of art and history, walking has become a kind of common ground to geographers, anthropologists, sociologists, photographers, and writers.

Yet the spatial disciplines, such as architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, curiously are not yet sufficiently focusing on this topic and on the clear relationships between walking, pedestrian mobility planning and making landscape.

This essay tries to define the meaning of pathway: as line, as artwork, as landscape design. At the same time Linearscape investigates the physical action of walking in the landscape, in current times, our understanding of movement in relation to understand of the landscape and the living environment.

Linearscape is a sort of dictionary made up with contribution of important references, ranging from landscape architecture, geography and anthropology and it aims to outline the path as a landscape design, not only with technical implications but also aesthetic, conceptual, cultural, anthropological. This paperback provides a repertoire of designs that emphasizes the role of path like instrument able to include everything around, extending the viewpoint in the realm of ideas, imagination, knowledge, measurement, time, memory, interacting with a site and turning it into the landscape.

7

It therefore investigates on the path not like object but as spatial device, like physical and conceptual organization of territory with respect to interaction with social agents, both individual and collective ones. It investigates path as spatial, social and geographic process.

It thus does not take into account the purely technical aspects related to the path’s design, but it rather takes into consideration the meaning and importance of the path on knowledge and promotion of the landscape. This essay tries to outline how important it can be a pathway in the rehabilitation of those marginal spaces that still need to be defined and which demand a project.

It is a design-oriented research that provides some reflections addressed to all the “actors” of the landscape transformations, which are involved on the mobility planning, but the interdisciplinary approach of this paper wants to attract the interest of a wider scientific world.

Linearscape is an investigation on the path’s design that starts from the experimentations of 70’s and from work by artists such as Long, Andre, Smithson to arrive at the most recent landscape designs that have represented pioneer solutions on this field. They range from ephemeral works of Landart to recent public spaces for walking made in the world. They range from a few meters of the path of Moses Bridge in Netherlands, up to two and a half kilometres of the High Line in New York.

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Certainly these case studies do not concern the big scale of landscape planning, however the idea behind this work is that paths’ planning can coincide with a landscape strategy.

In this sense the case studies are “input” to more general theme of pedestrian mobility planning, that is a well-timed topic since sustainable mobility is highly relevant in the contemporary discourse of architectural and urban design.

It also responds to the debate on the critical understanding of the natural environment as an essential resource for the (re)development of urban fabric.

For many reasons and purposes, people walked and walk, and they know that will walk more and more. The general economic and environmental crisis forces us to plan a sustainable mobility for the future, what we call eco-mobility, smart mobility or green mobility, in which the “walking” has a central role. Nevertheless the pedestrian mobility still has undiscovered potential for designers to which is assigned the task to plan and build it.

The existing approaches on the topic primarily relate to technical and technological aspects of the path’s design and there is no attention on anthropological, social, and geographic ones, aimed at supporting the development and planning of pedestrian mobility, which takes into account the values of the landscape.

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Despite the existence of a State of the Art and a bibliography, a research about pedetrian mobility and landscape planning (in Europe than in the rest of the world) is still not sufficient mainly due to the lack of open collaboration between different fields of knowledge. The State of the Art clearly shows that pedestrian mobility will be important for the future, but at the same it shows that understanding of the problems is still immature.

Linearscape is placed within an extensive research related to the architecture of public space and landscape architecture, particularly the one connected to issues of pedestrian mobility, to that even wider about walking and its anthropological implications, but in reality it takes as reference the investigations on landscape, its perception and the designs that enable to understand the ways of exploration and knowledge of territory.

This target inevitably implies issues such as the identity of places and the relationship between population and territory, the European Landscape Convention1 and the legal value that attaches to it.

“The landscape is part of the land, as perceived by local people or visitors, which evolves through time as a result of being acted upon by natural forces and human beings. “Landscape policy” reflects the public authorities’ awareness of the need to frame and implement a policy on landscape.

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The public is encouraged to take an active part in its protection, conserving and maintaining the heritage value of a particular landscape, in its management, helping to steer changes brought about by economic, social or environmental necessity, and in its planning, particularly for those areas most radically affected by change, such as peri-urban, industrial and coastal areas�.

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line 1 |līn| noun

L

1 a long, narrow mark or band: a row of closely spaced dots will look like a continuous line | I can’t draw a straight line.

• Mathematics a straight or curved continuous extent of length without breadth.

• a positioning or movement of a thing or things that creates or appears to follow such a line: her mouth set in an angry line | the ball rose in a straight line.

• a furrow or wrinkle in the skin of the face or hands.

• a contour or outline considered as a feature of design or composition: crisp architectural lines | the artist’s use of clean line and color.

• (on a map or graph) a curve connecting all points having a specified common property.

• a line marking the starting or finishing point in a race.

• a line marked on a field or court that relates to the rules of a game or sport.

• Football the line of scrimmage.

• ( the Line )the equator.

• a notional limit or boundary: the issue of peace cut across class lines | television blurs the line between news and entertainment.

• each of the very narrow horizontal sections forming a television picture.

• Physics a narrow range of the spectrum noticeably brighter or darker than the adjacent parts.

• (the line) the level of the base of most letters, such as h and x, in printing and writing.

• [ as modifier ] Printing & Computing denoting an illustration or graphic consisting of lines and solid areas, with no gradation of tone: a line block | line art.

• each of (usually five) horizontal lines forming a staff in musical notation.

• a sequence of notes or tones forming an instrumental or vocal melody: a powerful melodic line.

• a dose of a powdered narcotic or hallucinatory drug, esp. cocaine or heroin, laid out in a line.

2 a length of cord, rope, wire, or other material serving a particular purpose: wring the clothes and hang them on the line | a telephone line.

• a telephone connection: she had a crank on the line .

• a railroad track.

• a branch or route of a railroad system: the Philadelphia to Baltimore line.

• a company that provides ships, aircraft, or buses on particular routes on a regular basis: a major shipping line.

3 a horizontal row of written or printed words.

• a part of a poem forming one such row: each stanza has eight lines.

• (lines) the words of an actor’s part in a play or film.

• (lines) Brit.an amount of text or number of repetitions of a sentence written out as a school punishment.

4 a row of people or things: a line of acolytes proceeded down the aisle.

• a row or sequence of people or vehicles awaiting their turn to be attended to or to proceed.

• a connected series of people following one another in time (used esp. of several generations of a family): we follow the history of a family through the male line.

• (in football, hockey, etc.) a set of players in the forwardmost positions for offense or defense.

• Football one of the positions on the line of scrimmage.

• a series of related things: the bill is the latest in a long line of measures to protect society from criminals.

• a range of commercial goods: the company intends to hire more people and expand its product line.

• informal a false or exaggerated account or story: he feeds me a line about this operation.

• the point spread for sports events on which bets may be made.

5 an area or branch of activity: the stresses unique to their line of work.

• a direction, course, or channel: lines of communication | he opened another line of attack.

• (lines) a manner of doing or thinking about something: you can’t run a business on these lines | the superintendent was thinking along the same lines.

• an agreed-upon approach; a policy: the official line is that there were no chemical attacks on allied troops.

6 a connected series of military fieldworks or defenses facing an enemy force: raids behind enemy lines.

• an arrangement of soldiers or ships in a column or line formation; a line of battle.

• (the line) regular army regiments (as opposed to auxiliary forces or household troops).

verb [ with obj. ]

1 stand or be positioned at intervals along: a processional route lined by people waving flags.

2 (usu. as adj. lined) mark or cover with lines: a thin woman with a lined face | lined paper.

3 Baseball hit a line drive.

“A line is a dot that went for a walk.” Paul Klee

PATH i.e. LINE

The line is an object or a track, rectilinear or not, that connects two points - the beginning and the end - which called extremity.

Euclidean geometry defines the line as an endless series of dimensionless points close together; it has only one dimension, i.e. length, and lacks breadth and depth.

According to Jean François Billeter2, “line has neither body nor colour nor texture, nor any other tangible quality, its nature is abstract, conceptual, rational”.

The Swiss Sinologist thinks about an element without matter, as a projection, a cultural and rational construction of which people are inventors and users.

The Art Historian Alois Riegl3 says line has not been invented on the back of materials or technique, but in the natural course of an essentially artistic process, so it is a sign.

The line therefore is immaterial, imaginary, and theoretically ambiguous, it is vague and difficult to define. Confusion and profusion come to mind when thinking about its many meanings.

In technology field, for example, the line is a connection between communication devices such as telephone or computer.

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In hydraulic it is circulation system of pipes carrying water or gas. In various fields it is a symbol (horizontal, vertical or diagonal), which indicates a very clear idea; in mathematics it establishes both the concept of subtraction and division.

The line is a symbol of logic and simplicity, it is thus possible to follow a line of thought, or explain something in broad terms. The line can be fate, a commitment, and a fact.

For the Historians Anthony Grafton and Daniel Rosenberg4, it means time.

“Although its modern form did not even 250 years, the time line is so much a part of our culture that it is hard to think there was a time when we have acquired for the first time” (A. Grafton and D. Rosenberg 2012) People have “designed” genealogical lines, lines of thought, of travel. Retracing the “Brief history of the line”, the Anthropologist Tim Ingold5 identifies an anthropic universe made up of wires, tracks, trails, paths, mazes, highlighting the many different intangible qualities that the line can have, and many meanings it can take. People’s world seems made up of lines. Visible, less visible, invisible. Real or theoretical.

In addition to its many meanings, the ambiguity of the line lies in the nature of what unites and divides at the same time. In fact it can be also border.

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The geometry establishes if the line’s end points coincide, the line creates a surface and becomes border and outline, i.e. an intellectual construction that separates two spaces, two people, two ideologies, or two attitudes. There are “enemy line” and “starting line.”

According to the Architect Piero Zanini6, defining a boundary means “defining a fixed point from which start and to which to refer”.

“Daughter: Daddy, why do things have boundaries?

Father: Really? I do not know. What things do you mean?

Daughter: Yes, when I draw things, why do they have boundaries?

Father: Well, and other things... a flock of sheep? Or a conversation? Do these things have outlines?

Daughter: Do not be silly. You cannot draw a conversation. I mean things.

Father: Yes ... I was just trying to figure out what you meant. Do you want to say, “why when do we draw things we give them the edges?” Or do you mean that things have contours, which draw us or not?”

(Gregory Bateson 1985) It is evident from these possible declensions that, in each case, the line represents consequentiality of things, words, facts, elements. Everything is connected and comes after another one, but there are interesting variations of dotted, broken and fragmented.

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A line is said straight when the dots are lined up one behind the other one in a linear row, this figure type is called straight line if it has no beginning and no end, half line if it has a starting point or an ending point, segment and if it has both.

A line is said instead broken line when it is formed from contiguous segments joined to the ends and not having the same direction. The geometry establishes it is called curve when it can be said generated from a single point that moves randomly on the plane or in the space.

The Artist Wassily Kandinsky7 defines the line as an invisible entity that is trace of a moving point and it is therefore his own product.

“It arises from the movement - and specifically from point’s destruction, from its extreme quiet, in itself closed. Here it completes the jump from the static to the dynamic”.

(Wassily Kandinsky 1926) In this sense, the creative act determines the movement, the point’s trajectory, and consequently the line type. Straight or curved, strained or enveloping, for Kandinsky, the line is always energy that is transformed into matter.

The Painter Paul Klee8 argues that the line always exists, even when it is no drawn: at the edge of a colour pattern, at margin between the light and the shade, etc. On the sheet, the line separating two surfaces: a figure and a background, it divides and unites.

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However Klee recognizes as “the act of drawing a line constructs a shape over time: the line becomes awareness of spatial form over time�. The artist considers the line as the main structural element of the space.

According to both Kandinsky and Klee, the line represents the trajectory of a creative act.

Instead Tim Ingold notes that any physical entity becomes a line when it moves, without necessary creative ambitions.

The planes become trails in the sky; moving cars become coloured lines; animals become dotted lines of footprints on the ground. Also people, as soon as they walk, become lines. People movement in the space determines lines that are, more or less, visible and complex. The way in which they move, stop, restart, produces broken, zigzag, hatches, and also determine spatial and temporal consequentiality; going from location to another, and then to another again, stopping along the way. People movements and paths are lines consisting of a set of points that connect different places. Lines made up by geographical coordinates and precise positions in the landscape. Today there are theories and techniques for the analysis of spatial configurations (such as Space Syntax software) that allow drawing the lines produced by people movement in a given space. The aim is investigating the relationship between spatial organization and social economic and environmental phenomena, i.e. between space and lines.

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These tools are designed to understand as a spatial layout can affect the performance of the places – from the city scale to the middle scale of a street or a square – as well as social behaviours, economic or environmental conditions may gradually transform the space.

Like the paths “drawn” through menhir by primitive nomads to map their world, the Space Syntax geo-referenced lines describe the relationship between people and environment.

As the Architect Francesco Careri9 argues, prior to the Neolithic period, people had only one form to learn about and transform the space: it was the action of walking.

“The nomadic hunter has symbolically transformed the territories of the natural chaos, giving names to places and recognizing, he incardinated and acquired the space. Before the Neolithic era the only symbolic architecture capable of modifying the environment was walking, a simultaneous act of perceptive and creativity, of reading and writing of the territory.”

(Francesco Careri 2002) Even today, in certain places and cultures, marking trails or drawing lines in the landscape is a way to map the territory.

The Inuit of the Arctic for example move along “temporary” paths engraved on snow and ice that evolve in individual and social people memory.

Australian aboriginals mark their paths with more lasting traces through the arrangement of landmarks used to map hunting grounds.

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The lines drawn by people movement in the landscape are always closely related to the context. Even when they have no body, colour, texture, and quality as those ones returned by Space Syntax, in various forms and ways, they involve some modification of the territory that physically and temporarily cross.

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PATH i.e. ARTWORK

Since the sixties, when art begins to transform from a discipline that produces objects, to a conceptual and dematerialized investigation, drawing paths in the landscape becomes an aesthetic practice and a way of making art. The art becomes a research about spatial studies that bind the body to everyday life, the human body becomes a main element in the artistic production, and the walking action is revisited by artists, as one of the most natural and simple thing to discover.

Within this cultural fervour, in a conversation with Samuel Wagstaff on the pages of Artforum, 1966, the Artist Tony Smith10 wonders if the path is an artwork. “And if it is, how is? How big ready-made object? Like an abstract sign in the landscape? Like object or experience? Like a fact in itself or as an act of crossing? What role does the landscape around? “

Fact and act

The Artist Richard Long11 designs the first paths like “travel-work”, which he conducted with the main objective of “intellectual pleasure”. Much of his work as artist consists in the action of walking on the ground and leaving his trace. Walks often last several days pushing him to remote parts of earth, usually unexplored places. The path is a joint relationship with nature.

Long establishes a harmonic contact with the landscape, he modifies it, using the discretion of who however know that the nature proceed according to own rules.

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He marks, ranks. Later he collects tracks using a cold recording like photography, which remains, as well as for many works of Landart, the only evidence of the artist’s work.

In “A line made by walking”, 1967, Long reproduces in photo a grassy path traced by himself walking through a meadow.

The intention was to leave an imprint on the earth through any gesture. The line is metaphorically the artist or, in general, “the man that runs through the labyrinthine paths of its own life” that interacts with the place that he crosses.

Through the body, Long in some way measures space and time, perceptions and changes in the weather. The path is operation both figurative, visual, and perceptual.

Like other Long’s paths, “A line made by walking” defines and adds new meanings to the landscape; temporarily being a trademark.

Although the artist’s movement removes material rather than adding, the line is visible from the stems of grass bent beneath his feet.

“The image of the treaded grass contains the presence of absence: absence of action, absence of the body, absence of the object. But it is also unmistakeably the result of the action of the body, and it is an object, a something that is situated between sculpture, a performance and an architecture of the landscape”. (Francesco Careri 2002) 22

The beauty both physical and real, both symbolic and intellectual of Long’s work lies in the material (matter) that is the same of the landscape of which it is temporarily part.

“In the nature of things: Art about mobility, lightness and freedom. Simple creative acts of walking and marking about place, locality, time, distance and measurement. Works using raw materials and my human scale in the reality of landscapes.

The music of stones, paths of shared footmarks, sleeping by the river’s roar.”

(Richard Long 2005) Sometimes, Long leaves that paths are witnessed by fleeting tracks, other times from sculptures made by very simple materials found on site. Often his works consist on drawings or sculptures documenting his walks; in cases of long commutes, he uses maps on which drawing them.

The paths are straight lines or squares or spirals. In one of his works entitled “A straight line the length of a Walk from the Bottom to the Top of Silbury Hill”, using muddy boots, Long reproduces inside a gallery the path from the top of a hill till its base that he made before. The path turns from author’s direct experience in highly evocative image for the viewer.

The enduring and lasting performances by Long in fact tell the personal relationship between artist and environment as a creative, intimate and primitive “fact”.

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The locations that Richard Long uses for his work, rarely contemplate a human environment. He prefers places where people do not appear, so as even traces of the present or the recent past. Australia, Bolivian Andes and Himalayas are places he preferred to pursue its performance. Long’s paths are individual experiences, cannot be shared in most cases, if not through photography. The representations that the artist decided to use are artworks and also an invitation to personally live similar experiences.

Object and place According to the Artist Carl Andre , the path is the essence of art.

“Most of my works (...) are in some way streets, force you to follow them, go around or stand on it”.

Andre has revolutionized the sculpture concept, giving rise to idea of “artwork as a place”, that is a sculpture to use.

The Sculpture 43 Roaring forty (1968) at Kröller-Müller Museum in Netherlands is elementary in the strictest sense of the term, it represent the highest degree of simplicity and clarity. His sculpture is a paths from simple geometry obtained by the combination of basic geometric units. The materials used are just pieces of sand-lime bricks, which give an immanent materiality to his artwork. Andre’s path have no narrative or allusive intent but simply it declare themselves as objects.

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It is willing thoroughly in keeping with the scale and proportions of the garden museum, like other his paths are in harmony with the landscape or a luxuriant nature.

However Andre describes his work like “a place” alluding that his sculptures are made by simply placing units on the ground, but they have also property as “place of generation.”

“From the sculpture like form, to sculpture like structure, up to the sculpture like place.” The Artist considers his paths like not a summary of research that leads to formal perfection static but like a place, in which people are there. The paths interact with people. They change along the time due the interaction with public that walks on.

Andre describes his own work like atheist, materialist and communist. It is atheist since there are not transcendence or spiritual qualities; it is materialistic since the matter shows itself without references or allusions to something else; it is communist since it is usable by people without distinction.

According to Richard Long, the path is abstract sign and ephemeral object determined by crossing, but it is also highly individual experience that becomes shape. Whilst according to Carl Andre, the path is object of contemplation but also a place where everyone can feel, move and experience, in a report of physical contact.

Andre’s art can also no affect and go unnoticed, but it builds that a fundamental relationship with both context and people.

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Andre’s works are flat sculptures on which people can walk - inside the museum as well as outside in the nature - which can also be moved elsewhere and build another place, while Long’s works consist in the cultural personal act of walking.

Experience

Even according to Artist Robert Smithson , the path is a symbolic element of the relationship between man and nature.

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“The relationship that binds the individual to the environment is of paramount importance, since nature is the background to the picture of our existence; In fact, we are destined to blossom and disappear in its vast matrix; but our ambition and our inclinations, combining, induce us to want something more than mere survival: we aspire to make a mark, to inscribe our observations and our actions in the landscape, in an attempt to understand and overcome the space in which we live”.

(Robert Smithson 1966) His most famous and evocative work, “Spiral Jetty”, 1970, is a spiral path made up of stone and basalt that develops from the Utah’s coast to the Salt Lake.

Smithson chose this particular lake because it is home to ancient beliefs. Indeed Mormon settlers believed it was some sort of monster without end, connected to the ocean by a huge culvert, and for this reason its waters formed spirals and eddies of so intense power.

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The Spiral path is a primordial symbol, evocative element of the life processes but it also refers to specific aspects of the lake: it remembers eddies in water, shape of salt crystals and micro-organisms, snails, and the wrapping of celestial bodies too. The path is a great tribute to the nature and later it returns to the latter: just built, it lends itself to the action of salt water, the side surface of the walkway begins to be covered with micro-organisms, afterwards the salt concentration starts to climb toward the centre of the spiral, offering extraordinary changes. Time and natural phenomena creates a natural play of water colour: red in the spiral’s centre, purple and blue on the outside edges.

Robert Smithson is fascinated by the great natural transformation processes, by the fluidity and movement of the matter at any levels, from “cosmic chaos” to the places of accumulation and random collection of debris. He takes into account the time, which is not the time of Long’s contemplative walk, or the enjoyment time of the Andre’s works, It is the landscape time, weather and seasons.

“Spiral Jetty” allows people to walk and simultaneously make different experiences due to climate change, water level, and the nature contamination. The visionary path of Robert Smithson is a artwork in which people’s presence adds meaning. According to the American Artist in fact, people are pinnacle of creation and destruction; they are temporally part of the artwork as well as of the landscape.

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Richard Long - A line made by walking (1967) ŠRichard Long

Richard Long - A line in scotland (1981) ŠRichard Long

Richard Long - A line in Ireland (1974) ŠRichard Long

Carl Andre - 43 Roaring forty (1968) ŠGerardus

Robert Smithson - Spiral Jetty (1970) ŠCris Benton

Robert Smithson - Spiral Jetty (1970) ŠCris Benton

Robert Smithson - Spiral Jetty (1970) Š Cody & Jen Morgan

CREDITS Julie Akers Cris Benton David Berkowitz Jeremi Bigosinski (Rem) Gerardus Simon Johansson Richard Long Cody & Jen Morgan NASA RO&AD architecten Jรถrn Schiemann Turenscape

Walking attaches special meaning to the landscape and for this reason the issue involves more and more fields of knowledge.

Yet the spatial disciplines, such as architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, curiously are not yet sufficiently focusing on this topic and on the clear relationships between walking, pedestrian mobility planning and making landscape.

Linearscape tries to define the meaning of pathway: as line, as artwork, as landscape design. At the same time this essay investigates the physical action of walking in the landscape, in current times, our understanding of movement in relation to understand of the landscape and the environment.

It is a design-oriented research that provides some reflections addressed to all the “actors� of the landscape transformations, which are involved on the mobility planning, but the interdisciplinary approach of this paper wants to attract the interest of a wider scientific world.

Fabio Manfredi is postdoctoral researcher in Landscape Architecture and Spatial Planning. Since many years he is working on different topics related at landscape, its reading and its design, at several universities and research institutes in Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium. His work has been implemented with several research papers and books; he has involved in different international conferences, seminars and landscape exhibitions.

Since 2005 he is working as lecturer and tutor (in architecture, landscape architecture and urbanism) at University Mediterranea of Reggio Calabria (Italy), Delft University of Technology (Netherlands), Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium).