FORMA TERRAE - Productive Landscapes

Thesis Laboratory Productive Landscapes proposes FORMA TERRAE, an investigation into the capacity of architectural and landscape design to work in harmony with the earth’s morphology, giving new meaning to place. The exploration centers on a form of production rooted in the land, specifically, the extractive processes of quarrying, where raw matter is drawn from the ground to construct the surface, in a continuous act of shaping and reshaping the landscape.
The selected areas of study include major systems of urban quarries, vast voids in former mining territories, and extraordinary subterranean works, both architectural and infrastructural. These contexts embody a spatial experience intimately tied to the act of excavation and the corresponding material that has accumulated on the Earth’s surface.
Within this framework, the Laboratory engages a notion of architecture that, in these specific conditions, emerges as a system inseparable from its geological and topographic context: a vast “archaeology of the earth”. In this awareness, design recognizes the form of place as both a precondition and an essential matter of architecture, embracing a deeper responsibility toward ecological concerns, land consumption, soil reuse, and regenerative processes that regard mineral matter as “living” and as the tectonic foundation of the contemporary landscape.