Vol. 23 No. 2 (2025): Nature, Myth, Design
Mito e progetto / Myth and Project

Wilderness and Care

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  • Silvia Mundula
Silvia Mundula
Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/rv-18045

Published 2026-05-08

Keywords

  • Wilderness,
  • Western culture,
  • Antigone,
  • Contemporary wild garden,
  • Care

How to Cite

Mundula, S. (2026). Wilderness and Care. Ri-Vista. Research for Landscape Architecture, 23(2), 188–201. https://doi.org/10.36253/rv-18045

Copyright (c) 2025 Silvia Mundula

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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Abstract

This paper offers a reflection on the legacy of the wild in contemporary gardens, by exploring its cul-tural perception in Antigone focusing on the consideration that gardens that include wilderness in their design require a particular kind of care, providing a holistic view of the relationship between de-sign and nature. This paper aims to demonstrate how the meaning of the wild completely changes with a greater level of knowledge. In Ancient Greece, nature was not perceived as a separate entity and there was no clear distinction between the natural and the human, or the divine and the earthly. The distinction mainly was between visible and invisible. Wilderness was perceived as something lo-cated outside the city. The wilderness or the desert, in the case of Antigone, were fearsome places mainly because they were unknown. However, Sophocles, by overturning the characters’ spheres of action, reveals a complex perception of the wild, leading to ethical questions. In both the Athenian tragedy and the contemporary garden, wilderness emerges as a value to learn from and as a stora-ge of references.

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