JCN Forestier e Pietro Porcinai. Giardini industriali per un nuovo paesaggio urbano

As stated in 2013 by IFLA Europe, currently “Landscape architects [...] work with the built and natural environment to create wildlife habitats, innovative spaces, install sustainable infrastructure and improve environmental quality, health and wellbeing, and create thriving communities.” The deepest roots of this professional and ethical approach, always aimed to create healthscape, can be found in the XIX century within the revolutionary work of Frederick Law Olmsted. His promising explorations have then been strengthened by the crucial work of some landscape architects who, in the first half of XX century, integrated goals of health and wellness not only into garden and urban open space design, but also into landscaping of production sites. In order to develop this line of research, the paper follows the paths of two of the most skilled (and in some senses misunderstood) Mediterranean landscape architects in the XX century: Jean Claude Nicolas Forestier (1861-1930) e Pietro Porcinai (1910-1986). Jean Pierre Le Dantec defined Forestier as a «lacking element» in the chain of the French landscape architecture evolution. Porcinai ,“foreigner in his own country”, according to the definition proposed by Bruno Zevi, has been considered for a long time only a glamorous garden designer for the high middle class in the second half of the XX century. Nevertheless he has played undoubtedly an outstanding role, mostly appreciated at an international level, in defining the widest disciplinary field of landscape architecture. During all his life, he tried to work on landscaping of public open spaces, despite the diffused lack of attention on this crucial issue. He wrote: “Beyond the garden ‘stricto sensu’, we have to focus on landscape: beyond private green spaces, we have mostly to take care of public green spaces. The big issue of our time is reconstructing, on a conscious level, the solidarity between Man and Nature”. Indeed, Forestier's work and Porcinai's work, despite the necessary differences due to the times change, were both intended to preserve and replenish this solidarity at the different scales of intervention, from the smallest garden portion to the whole urban and metropolitan system, bringing an innovative attitude at the different categories of open spaces design, as well as on their systemic definition. At the beginning of the twentieth century Forestier, forest engineer and maître jardiniste, introduced the concept of open space system in France as a structuring basis for the urban planning, based on the teachings of the American School of Olmsted and his "Park system" in Boston. He worked in landscape planning and design, in the reconfiguration of historic gardens, urban parks, open spaces and promenades in France and abroad, with a particular preference for countries with a Mediterranean climate. Founder of the French Society of Urban planners in 1911, Forestier played the uncomfortable role of claiming the value and visionary power of garden art in a period in which dealing with design and compositional issues appeared a sign of disengagement social. He proposed an integrated and multidisciplinary vision of landscape project through the scales, combining deep respect for heritage sites with their reinvention for the community by a contemporary approach. Pietro Porcinai was son on of the head gardener of Villa Gamberaia in Settignano (Florence). He defined the profession of the landscape architect in Italy, exploring in detail all its different application potentiality since the early 1930s. Through his long professional training, the Italian landscape architect explored many fields of interest adopting differentiated skills and tools, but with unchanging ethical attitude: landscape integration of large infrastructures, restoration of historic gardens, active conservation and savage of archaeological sites, design of private park or urban open spaces. Forestier and Porcinai both have deeply transformed methods and tools with which to tackle the landscape project in the Mediterranean area, claiming its peculiarities and cultivating cultural differences with respect to the consolidated landscape architecture active in Northern Europe with the aim of (re)defining a specific project for countries blessed by “climat de l'oranger” (citrus tree climate). Comparing their attitudes and design approach in reinventing industrial parks as healthscapes can be an interesting opportunity of research to investigate their different attitudes in integrating productive infrastructures into Mediterranean heritage landscapes in a sustainable and compatible way.