A core topic for landscape architecture education is how to deal with ordinary places, renewing perception and invention tools. We propose to use playing as a design method. In Italian, paesaggio is a noun of action derived from a verb. To play is to act, in a creative and adaptive way, mixing visible and hidden, actual and imaginary items. To image landscape could be a serious game of civic arts based on simulation, on the “as if” stratagem, taking city by surprise. Stressing the idea of landscape as result of actions (material and/or intangible) and producing landscape by playful in situ artistic interventions, we can feed awareness of the inventive potential of our eyes (how to look) and hands (how to transform). Among the open spaces of the city, car parks exemplify more than others the potential of imaginative new practices to activate ordinary landscapes of our cities.
Annalisa Metta, Landscape as a Play Action. The “as if” Stratagem (2013)
Franco Zagari & Annalisa Metta (curators), Author’s Follies & Creative adventures (2019)
landscape theory 