Designing time

Time is a fundamental instrument for the construction of any landscape, for which it helps to define, through the designer’s objectives, strategies, settings and structure. The growth of vegetation, like environmental variations and social and political modifications, contribute to the perception of time on different scales, as an agent of transformation. A project’s success is strictly tied to the capacity of the landscape architect to understand the dynamics of time, seconding them, contrasting them or wittingly guiding them. For a landscape that is connoted by a strong “archeological” component, time no longer constitutes just one of the operational instruments of the designer, but evidently it also becomes the prevalent dimension of these places. Of the materials making up an archeological landscape, time, in all its declinations, is without a doubt the one that characterizes it fundamentally, defining its spatial and semantic structure and organizing its reading and interpretation.