This research strand investigates how the traditional human–nature antinomy has strongly shaped landscape design, and what changes when such separations are set aside. The landscape is not read as composed of distinct domains, but understood globally as a new, emergent form of “nature,” shaped through cultural, material, and ecological practices. Courtyards, roof gardens, plazas, and commons become testing grounds for design strategies that enable the built environment to sustain ecological processes—biodiversity, microclimate regulation, water cycles—together with a re-signification of space. Methodologically, the project combines a trandisciplinary approach, archival critique, sectional and site-specific analysis, design-build prototyping, and performance monitoring to assess when interventions generate genuine ecological capacities and when they remain symbolic gestures. The aim is not the celebration of hybridity in itself, but the search for projective logics that reconfigure a cultural framework for both aesthetic and ecological quality.

Stefano Melli