Recently, preparing for an interview, I was thinking about my experience in landscape architecture. Landscape architecture’s definition admits multiple meanings, floating between designing the landscape and designing into the landscape.

I come from a country, Italy, where it’s very hard not to face the landscape approaching a project: if it is not the natural landscape, it’s the historical one within the urban scene, but very often the so called natural environment is primarily historical, because of the human intervention along the centuries. So, swinging between cultural and natural, I think that landscape is an unavoidable factor in each experience for an Italian architect, being something deeply rooted in his memory that become a professional skill by practicing and by designing. In my opinion, both you are designing a landscape and you are designing into it, it should be a matter of identities.

Colour Plan to preserve identity

Colour is strongly related to places’ identity. In Italy a lot of cities had adopted a specific Plan of Colour to identify which colours you can use in the historical centre and which you don’t. Rules are always required when bad behaviour emerged, but a knowledge deficit about a place identity is hardly filled up by proposing a restricted palette of colour. The overlapping of styles, epochs, cultures, and all the dominations with their legacies, are the most readable feature in a Italian city.

Layers span since ancient Roman (or ancient Greek in the very South) to Spanish, French, Austrian influences until the 19th century. Each dominator brought a set of colour and material and each epoch expressed its palette as result of technical knowledge and chemical discoveries. So, as Francesca Valan said when she worked on the Plan of Colour for Milan, which the colour of Milan is, that means which the Milan’s identity is, it’s a very hard question to answer.

Nevertheless a colour identity is easily recognizable. The blood-red façade (actually that colour was obtained by bulls’ blood) is a mark of Bologna, even if a canal remind Venice. The pale yellow coupled with light grey of pietra serena looks indubitably Florentine even if you are not seeing the Brunelleschi’s dome. White is a features of southerner city, mostly for climatic reasons. This is what happen in the city, but moving to the countryside, colours keep their role as identity factor.

Colour and landscape identity factor

When you design a building within a rural area, if that zone is protected because of its landscape importance, you have not a Plan of usable colour, but you need an environmental appraisal. If you are working on an historical building you need special permits provided by special commission (the equivalent of English Heritage in UK) to start. But you always need a permit by the local authorities to build according to the local plans, codes, and standard, that change frequently moving few kilometres. It’s always a matter of identity. The more local identity is strong, the more codes and standard mark differences.

Probably Tuscany expresses all this features at the maximum level: historical and landscape, greatness and parochialism living together. Tuscany is probably the place where landscape is the most deeply designed in the world, where everything is all but natural, and where the whole panorama follow composing rules as a painting. So we can learn by Tuscany something about landscape design observing the landscape as a painting.

Looking at colour, we find similar differences between bordered Region as we find comparing cities: the blood-red farmhouse is typical in Emilia Romagna, while the pale yellow buildings dot the Tuscan countryside. Both the landscape have a shared feature: they aim at balance. Searching for balance is a common strategy in Mediterranean countryside landscape. On the contrary, the seascapes seem to play more with hard contrast (see at the most coloured building in Venice or Genoa, or the pure white typical in the whole South of Italy). How they reach their aims define identity.

Landscape as a living painting

The countryside is a productive place. Following the productive cycles, farming changes how the landscape looks along the seasons, so as the colour balance change. Landscape is not something permanent: choosing a settings with deciduous or evergreen plants and choosing the buildings’ or roads’ colours, means designing the landscape through its variability. We don’t create a perfect setting but we establish the conditions for different harmonic balances. So because harmonic balance seems to be the common rule.

In Tuscany the pale yellow buildings are referred to the hay-field in summer: the rule to aim at balance is contrasting the same hue (yellow) changing saturation and brightness. Contrasting complementary colours (blood-red and late spring green in Emilia Romagna), using the same brightness and similar level in saturation, is a different way to obtain the same result: balance!

In the seaside, contrast seems weight more than balance. High visibility of build-up area from the sea was a prevalent requirements for many place along the Mediterranean coasts, but we find a similar approach also in the North of Europe. The highest level of contrast in the South, where the sky and sea have a well saturated blue, is obtained using pure white.

The gloomy grey sky and sea in certain Northern area contrast well with high saturated and bright hues. Actually, contrasting in saturation and brightness is the most effective in the distance. So, this rule is recognizable where perceiving a point on the horizon is important. One more time, how the goal is obtained, marks the places’ identity.

Observing, learning, designing

Observing an existing landscape like a painting is a practical exercise to discover some useful rules for landscape design. Of course, a lot of factors worked and works to define colours in the landscape. It’s not a case that the most important seaport in Europe was the most coloured cities: mineral and spices coming from Far East were unloaded here.

Visiting the exhibition “Making Colour” at the National Gallery, all that factors influencing painting emerge clearly. The same issues are very well explained in “Bright Heart: the invention of colour”, by Philip Ball. The role of technology in the history of Art and of Architecture is often neglected, but it’s an important player. So, investigating landscape alsofrom this point of view, could be useful.

Learning what the existing landscape says about its identity could help us to design the next, changeable and unstable balance we would aim at.

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Photo Credits:

1. Patrizia Bertini [https://www.flickr.com/photos/pat_universe/]

2. Erin Murphy [http://www.pinterest.com/pin/138345019775632481/]

3. Florence [https://www.airbnb.ca/]

4. Maurizio Ragni [http://maurizioragni.zenfolio.com/p262642816/h664405bb#h664405bb]

5. Gabriele Romagnoli [https://www.flickr.com/photos/1959dr/3983756159/in/set-72157607198159678/lightbox/]

6. No credits available

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8. No credits available

9. Patrizia Bertini [https://www.flickr.com/photos/pat_universe/]