Intermediate Natures. The Landscapes of Michel Desvigne
Michel Desvigne con contributi di James Cornere Gilles A. Tiberghien, Birkhäuser, Basel 2008 (pp. 200, s.i.p.)

James Corner opens the book with a rereading of Michel Desvigne's work according to three categories: Agriculture, Texture and Unfinished. The first includes well-established methods and knowledge. The second deconstructs the modernist figure-background relationship. The third deals with time. Desvigne then suggests other connotations: the link between rigour and innovation over easy shortcuts; the use of prototypes for experimentation with density and crop management; the construction of vocabularies serving the definition of new public spaces; the idea that park systems function as urban infrastructure; rejection of the facile rhetoric of sustainability; the static and aesthetic meaning of the notion of landscape; and his love of Olmsted and geography. A clear perception of the time lapse between cultivation and construction emerges.

There is a clear distance between Intermediate Natures and inflated landscape literature. This can be seen in the importance attributed to the theoretical framework, the significance of the written word, the number and type of illustrations, and the projects presented, which lend themselves to a game. Leaving aside book and author for a moment, they could be ascribed to two different trajectories and two different genealogies could be identified: territorial design, its materials and its figures, and landscape design, botany and the techniques derived from agriculture. Desvigne often stresses divergence when he writes that the pleasure of site domestication is different from the pleasure of building. He works with intermediate materials. He deals with time rather than predicting outcomes. He insists on cultivation methods and a few elementary materials: grass, mineralised surfaces, water and plants. Two genealogies. Different forms of knowledge and a different designer profile: an explorer, not a town planner.

But the two will overlap at some point, and the differences seem to cancel each other out. Desvigne asks the same questions as town planners: how do you read changes in the contemporary city? How do you lend consistency to a fragmented territory? How do you restore the sense of common space to public space? His designs, like the urban ones, tend towards a better functioning of the territory. They respond to primary needs such as protecting oneself against the wind, improved circulation, guaranteed sunlight and building descriptions that reveal the site, give meaning to places and open up the imagination. The discourses readily refer to a known organicism. In both cases, the design has to do with the public sphere. The landscape is produced by society and not by personal visions. The designer should contribute to a transformation and show a different way of living. On this terrain, the two trajectories are blurred against the background of a critical pragmatism that rereads the project as an experimental investigation, focused on public problems that are never established in advance. This work can lead to a redefinition of the meaning and impact of problems and their solutions, but without guarantees.

The dual factor that finds a point of convergence is not much of a game. For 20 years now, urban design has been rewritten in the landscape. Indeed, it would be helpful to stop coining neologisms that mix the word landscape with everything. Territorial designs and landscape designs are indistinguishable, or rather they can be differentiated on another level: they can be good or bad projects, addressing problems with skill and intuition, or be mannerist exercises that reproduce attitudes. They can even be dogmatic or neo-positivist like so much revived ecology. But the dual aspect reappears when you seek to legitimise action. Here, you discover a new divergence and the possibility of another exercise: observing "the tyranny of values" (as Schmitt would say) in the field of design and the question of landscape. These values are always contradicted by other values, which are positioned (something applies more, less, or against something else). Even when that something concerns nature, the territory is a common asset and the landscape a form of humanism. Reciprocal upgrading and downgrading become real via the mediation of technical thought. There are values that people try to impose perhaps simply by naming them, because (Schmitt again) "those who argue their validity must make them valid". Legitimisation is therefore a divergence, a distance (in values) linked to an absence of distance (in practice). This is a distinction constructed on a lack of distinction and on a distance that does not exist. It is in the genealogies, in the belonging and in the values, but not in the doing. An oxymoron of the kind that would have pleased Bourdieu. Cristina Bianchetti