Il paesaggio come paradigma cognitivo trans-storico. La Mongolia come caso studio

This essay concerns the concept of landscape. Particularly it attempts to overcome the limits of merely emotional or quantitative approaches – ontologically tending to privilege topicality, therefore to bring back/reduce landscape complexities to single photograms – recognizing a fourth dimension to the landscape: the temporal dimension. A dimension that allows considering the landscape as the result of anthropic dynamics developed in the longue durée. In other terms it means associating the landscape to a sort of civil program in which man – in quality of protagonist of his culture – registers the phases of his civilization. Tackling the theme of the temporal dimension of the landscape and imagining the figure of a designer able to identify – in a diachronic way – the settlement vocation of a natural environment through the critical-interpretative of the interaction between civilization and the natural environment, inevitably leads to framing the question of landscape within a research field with clear design imprinting, that is to say, a modus operandi essentially aimed towards a – conscious – transformation of a landscape reality. The application-experimental field of the research is the territory of Mongolia. A multi-faceted landscape, apparently scarcely anthropized, whose essence and balance are based on a silent and constant interaction process between environmental, social-economic and settlement conditions based on the co-existence between permanent and non-permanent culture. The historic-anthropological data was decrypted in a critical and conjectural fashion, with the purpose to fit it within a project research aimed at identifying the so called “lines of strength” of reality, which are decisive and generalized in the behaviours, thus able to be translated as settlement principles typical of the various landscape scales.

Keywords: Landscape, longue durée, becoming, design reading, Mongolia, rational model