Corpo a corpo

Abstract

Bodies make immaterial, impermanent, and impregnable urban geographies, and thereby affirm and claim the open spaces of the city as fields of opportunity, repositories of not pacified and controversial rituals, therefore fruitful. Bodies have an explicit design value; they are cognitive as well as configurative tools. When we put bodies at the center of the project, we outline performative landscapes in both environmental and aesthetic, emotional and behavioral terms. At the same time, we male authentically erotic landscapes, which are opportunities for mixing, commingling, generating situations pulsating with life. We make landscape of great sensualism, in the very sense of expansion and amplification of sensibilities attentive to contextual interactions, both present and eventual. This paper investigates some of declinations of this statement, going through different scales and fields, from urban history to art history, and then dwells on some notable examples of contemporary landscape architecture.