Hidden Gardens: Italy

The Portuguese Way
20-28 October 2018

Hidden Gardens: Italy, 19–24 October 2015

Marble Quarry in Vila Viçosa, Matyas Enz

…the garden which discloses what the city ought to be.

Colin Rowe & Fred Koetter, Collage City

As architecture ages, gardens grow like cultivated rooms between building and landscape. Rome dissolves the distinction between architecture, gardens and the passage of time, where ancient monuments are overgrown and modernisation struggles under the weight of history. We will explore the city/garden as both a place of political conflict and a place of symbiotic balance; houses are designed as landscapes, plants ruin cities to create romantic idylls.

Rome’s seven hills have always dictated an integral appreciation of the lie of the land and that has placed garden and architecture on a single plane. Water changed landscape, agriculture and urban development in aqueducts, fountains and reservoirs of Rome, for the benefit of farmers, citizens, emperors and Gods. We will discover how an Empire grew with the power of water, how it irrigated the exuberance of the Renaissance and Baroque imagination and how it planted the roots of modernity.

Every year thirty thousand pilgrims walk the 610 km Caminho Português from Lisbon north to Santiago da Compostela seeking to the strengthen the spirit. In 2018 we followed our own pilgrimage of material production also beginning in Lisbon, travelling north tracing the production of ceramics, stone and wood from quarry to the floors and walls of Portuguese architecture. We saw the distinctive pink-hued marble being extracted at Estremoz and later its masterful use by Alvaro Siza. Artists, manufacturers and architects guided us around their cities and landscapes leading us to the architecture of Tavora, Siza and Souto de Moura, the three generations who have shaped Portuguese architecture as we know it today. We witnessed see how nature and manufacturing not only form the foundation for some of the most distinctive contemporary architecture, but also how they guide a culture out of the deepest economic travails of recent times.

Students:

Tatjana Bergmeister, Philippe Bleuel, Anja Bouvard, Nick Däschler, Philip Einhaus, Matyas Enz, Claudia Fleischmann, Sandro Fritschi, Mona Fögler, Alexandra Grieder, Luana Günthardt, Benjamin Han, Mara Huber, Niels Loffing, Julia Nahmani, Moritz Schudel, Emily Tobler, Sara Tomasini, Ali Uzun, Tobias Wagner, Zhiyu Zeng

Marble Quarry in Vila Viçosa, Amy Perkins

Marble Quarry in Vila Viçosa, Matyas Enz

Quinta da Malagueira, Evora, Alvaro Siza, Matyas Enz

Portugal Pavilion, Lisbon, Alvaro Siza, Matyas Enz

Portugal Pavilion, Lisbon, Alvaro Siza, Amy Perkins

Estufa Fria, Lisbon, Amy Perkins