Intermediate Landscapes. Projects for Expo Milan 2020-2035

The thesis starts from the question posed by the end of Expo on the future of an uncertain and suspended area, situated between two realities: the rapidly increasing city and the countryside that tries to resist it. Rather than predicting the prevalence of one over the other, it was chosen to let them interfere by accepting time as part of the project.

The proposal, in fact, unfolds in three moments, three intermediate landscapes, accomplished but not concluded, able to accept the space of the eventual. This is made possible by the fact that the project is articulated in ‘invariants’ and ‘possibilities’. The main invariant is a double structure, a dual-scale landscaping framework, spatial backbone and settlement rule, consisting of rows of poplars that emphasize the existing regulatory layout, and a forest that crosses the boundaries of the area, reconnecting it to the territorial system of the agro-urban parks already present. Possibilities enrolled in it, as solutions for specific places, on the basis of the relationship between plural conditions and subjects over time.

Each intermediate landscape is therefore a hypertext, a recognizable project, functioning and part of a chaining, son of a posture that looks at forms as the result of forces acting on different subjects, in a negotiation of equilibriums to be redefined within the dynamic field of the city because, as Gilles Deleuze once said: “The world is neither true nor real, but living”.