Landscape as forma mentis.

With respect to multiple theories and interpretations within which the 'concept of landscape' oscillates, this research attempts to re-define the notion - of landscape -, bringing it back to the original condition of man-nature relation: sort of first derivative of the interaction between 'the being' (man) and 'the entity' (reality). In the effort to trace the cultural origins of the issue, the attempt is to link the matter to a paradigm of thought linked to a dimension constituting man, his awareness. Hence the need to consider the implications that each landscape embodies and consequent need to recognize its essence: by rationalizing its formative/transformative process through the elaboration of a 'model' that operates at the level of scientific explanation and which is able to decrypt its meaning, by unifying its identity character to the 'in the making'; and by systematizing its knowledge through the progressive identification of relations between components and scalar level of complexity concerning the landscape itself. In other words, an attempt is made to formulate a unifying cognitive-evaluation of the concept of landscape by defining an analysis tool of logic-classification type, aiming at the phenomenological-synthetic reading of all elements making up a landscape with the purpose to steer relative design choices with awareness.
The application-experimental field of the research is the territory of Mongolia. A landscape multi-faceted and apparently little anthropized, whose essence and balance are based on a silent and constant interaction process between environmental, social-economic and settlement conditions based on the co-existence between permanent and not permanent culture.
The book is accompanied by a multimedia attachment - containing thematic maps, maps of anthropic phases of Mongolian landscape and urban informal settlements - that can be downloaded for free from the area of the Biblioteca Multimediale of our site www.francoangeli.it

"Outside the illusive dream of idealists and fake and ambiguous determinism of positivists, only the single reality of our world and nature had to be understood, its and our real process had to be comprehended... Namely, it was necessary to remain linked to the strictly environmental and historic world, to not replace the structures even minimally, experiment only on them our distinction and interpretation skill, proceed from the resulting to actual particular structures, from the whole to textual components. Thus it becomes vital to recognise the living organicity of that individual and concrete world, not already substitutive composite organisms, the living structures, not only thought mechanisms, the subjects we perceive on the place, not merely imagined intuitions. Only inside that absolutely real and non-ambiguous picture, the way that we distinguish, read, interpret with the relations and connections becomes actually efficient for human purposes, because it will be the only true factor in our demanded truth and real factor of our natural reality; therefore it will be the only way to actually produce something creative and new, truly positive and non-ambiguous." Saverio Muratori

Nicola Scardigno. Ph.D., research associate and adjunct professor of architectural design and landscape design at DICAR, Department of Civil Engineering and Architecture of the Polytechnic of Bari. He obtained a 2-year research bursary from the University of Wales (2011-2013) and a research bursary from ISUF International Seminar on Urban Form (2014-2015). His research mainly investigates type-morphological aspects derived from formative and transformative process of landscapes with the aim to identify design principles.