Vol. 20 No. 1 (2022): Walking and Staying in the Landscape
Progetti/Designs

Camminare come progetto: coreografie di paesaggio attraverso ferrovie dismesse

Giacomo Dallatorre
DIDA, Dipartimento di Architettura, Università degli studi di Firenze

Published 2022-07-01

Keywords

  • Disused railways,
  • walking,
  • landscape perception,
  • landscape design

How to Cite

Dallatorre, G. (2022). Camminare come progetto: coreografie di paesaggio attraverso ferrovie dismesse. Ri-Vista. Research for Landscape Architecture, 20(1), 238–263. https://doi.org/10.36253/rv-12533

Abstract

Observing the evolution of the railway network, in Italy, the presence of eight thousand abandoned kilometers undermines the ways of crossing and the forms of perception that have consolidated over time around a track. Overcoming the opposition between the speed of the train and the slower one of man – and capturing the intuition of Dixon Hunt in the essay Lordship of the feet – walking is a practice to experiment different ways of experiencing an open space as a railway route. The essay interprets the footprints left by six landscape architects, exploring a track with the perception of their own body to suggest more than one movement in the next drawing, as an opportunity to reflect on the role that can be attributed to the path.

Encountering the contemporary culture of the landscape project, through an interview with the subjects involved, the journey allows us to begin dialoguing with a local railway heritage, overcoming the perspective of a mono-functional use or reuse, to follow the trajectory of a recovery project as choreography of the crossed landscape.