Floating experiences: between landscape contemplation and environnemental engagement

The relationship between city and water is explored through some case studies, where boat’s reuse is a means of raising awareness of nature protection, understood in its multiple dimensions.
They are proposals and experimentations challenging the fact of carrying soil and vegetation instead of people.
If the common denominator is the need to give space to nature, every project shows different reasons and different aspects of this “saved nature”. From Smithson’s drawing about a Floating island (1970), to the installations at the Biennale of Venice (2000), we can read a turning point about architecture, which is an artifact, a cultural product, proposed as no more “dominating” but “involving” nature into this floating experience.
Water is seen both as a landscape feature, a cultural value, and also as a metaphor of a shared condition, where architecture is a medium for testing sustainable ways of inhabiting the territory.
More recently, the theme of water management is dealt with in the exhibition "Drought in the delta" at IABR 2020-21, where, in reference to the Latour essay, "Down to Earth", the territory is proposed as a resource to be defended. Today more than ever, climate change calls for new ways of living and transforming the landscape, taking care of the soil, water, and all natural resources, through sustainable and shared strategies. The atelier of architectural design is a place where to experiment with these new approaches to rediscovering water as an identity value and resource of the territory, encouraging exchanges between different faculties of architecture and their contexts of study and experimentation.