Paesaggi avanzati. A Lexicon

Industrialization shaped our landscape by huge settlements, but also by more diffuse, apparently lighter and off stage structures, that make the patches of land, around or along them, verbatim disappear in the consciousness and care, landscapes in state of suspension. These landscapes are hardly conceivable by traditional categories, in terms of esthetic, space, ecology and function. We propose to describe them with the adjective “avanzato”, which in Italian has a double meaning: it stands at the same time for “advanced” and “leftover”. As their representation is indeterminate and their status always changing, they required a new narrative: we propose a hybrid “Lexicon of Paesaggi Avanzati”, made of words and figures both inspired by botany and mechanics. We present a case study in Rome, in the chaotic and fragmented eastern side of the city, where several infrastructures penetrate into the heart of the urban fabric. Using the Lexicon as a descriptive as well inventive tool, we intend verify the potential of paesaggi avanzati to become a connective tissue, towards a new relationship between the city and the areas cut off by the infrastructure: the “advanced/left over” landscape becomes part of the city, a new exception within the ordinary tissues, working as a "decompression system" made of complex stratigraphy.