Uomini, vegetali, animali e macchine. I paesaggi cibernetici di Marcello D’Olivo

Abstract

Marcello D’Olivo (1921-1991) is an atypical figure in the Italian architectural panorama of the twentieth century, essentially solitary and foreign to the schools of thought of his time. Central to his work is design and theoretical research in which technology, mathematics and nature converge, with the intention of outlining a new way of generating relationships between architecture and the environment. D’Olivo has in fact hypothesized a cultural hybridization between technology and nature inspired by cybernetics which finds, in the desire to overcome traditional dichotomous categories such as machine/nature, similarities with highly current themes such as posthumanist theories and the conceptualization of cybernetic landscapes. His prescient intuitions make the project a synthesis of cultural diversity inspired by the vision of a planet as a place of coexistence of “men, plants, animals and machines”, interesting to rediscover in light of the complexity of the contemporary world.