Paisea #010

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Very seldom is the landscape made up exclusively of inert elements and, generally speaking, vegetation is the decisive visual element in the configuration of many landscapes. Vegetation is what most often makes landscapes dynamic, thanks to its seasonal changes and the growth inherent to these living beings.

This subject, dealt with in every issue of paisea in our 'green section', is of great importance to us and we know that it also concerns our readers, so on this occasion, we have decided to go a step further and dedicate an entire issue to the element of vegetation, in an attempt to contribute to a better understanding of both vegetation and the wide variety of possibilities that it offers us when carrying out a landscapem project.

We would also like to point out that, far from the return to the wild that the proposed subject may suggest, we acknowledge the undeniably man-made nature of almost any landscape, even in natural areas apparently far removed from any intervention, as we may have influenced the composition of vegetation in some way. This human influence has often created positive new values in landscapes (creating, for example, beautiful agricultural mosaics). Unfortunately, though, there are also cases where 'green' is simply used as an excuse for unfortunate interventions which do not follow any ecological or botanical criteria and have no intention of creating a functional system.

In this issue we will show you different projects in which vegetation plays a key role. Each intervention interprets and uses vegetation in a different way. Some projects create genuine systems of vegetation, like the renaturalization of the Seymaz river by Ar-ter, the design for a living system in Feyssine Park by Ilex, or the original intervention carried out by the Noel Harding Studio in Canada; others are more formal, selecting and treating vegetation sensibly and coherently, as is the case of the Plaza del Desierto in Barakaldo, the urban park of Issoudun or the Botanic Gardens at Cranbourne. We are also featuring other projects, equally interesting, among which we might highlight the intervention in Dyck Castle, as it is a very different example which helps us to understand the strong dynamism that vegetation can produce in the landscape, because with a single plant species there are constant changes of colour and volume, with the species also proving highly effective for the production of bioenergy.

We hope, then, that this issue will give an adequate response to the requests we have received from you and that it will provide you with useful and practical information when considering how to approach a project which works with vegetation. We also hope that it will help us to reflect on the role of vegetation in the landscape and to gain a more critical perspective on any space where vegetation is present.