GREEN, THE NEW CHALLENG OF LIVING

The mythical gardens of Babylon, wanted by Nabucodonosor, represent the apotheosis of the built green and refer to the custom and the perfect integration between the system of organized green and the living.
Whether true or false, the myth of the gardens of Babylon bears witness, like all the positive myths aimed at raising the spirit from the human condition, to an extraordinary vision that embodies the aspiration of man to integrate himself into the natural environment domesticating it for its own purposes.
Dedicating this issue of the SMC magazine to Green and, in particular, to Green in Mediterranean environments, has turned out to be an intriguing and difficult choice; the richness, variety and splendor of the vegetation of these territories and the refinement of the solutions that different cultures have developed over time, shape suggestive scenarios of inestimable value that are confronted with the new challenges and the radical changes of today’s living. In our imagination, the iconography of green in Mediterranean settlements marries architecture in a network of gardens, vegetable gardens, closed spaces, terraces, a vast repertoire born out of the functions for which the green was designed in relation to the needs of air conditioning, production, privacy and shadowing.The typical Mediterranean configuration of the green space circumscribed by walls or built volumes is the most explicit and recurrent form of the relationship between solids and voids in the anthropized settlements that becomes a transition zone in the sub-urban margin bands between the city nucleus and the surrounding area.(Sanesi G., Lafortezza R., 2003) […]