Water as a landscape builder. A unique matter for cultural and sustainable city design

EFLA Regional Congress of Landscape Architecture, 02-04 Nov., 2011, Tallin, EstoniaWater is a structuring element, an integrator and constructor of landscape, since it connects all landscape components and it is capable to activate and substantially support its dynamics. The landscape built by Water can acquire a strategic instrumentality in urban contexts as being, a critical matter determinant in life, and an eloquent mediator between the material, cultural, and natural reality of landscape. The sustainable use and revelation of water, implicates a holistic and systemic approach, considering its global dimension as matter, space and time, interpreting it, as motive and consequence to specificity of site and its contextual possibilities. This requires methodologies to deal with landscape performance, as a conjoint experience, as long as biophysical system and as cultural and architectonic entity, and to research representation and implementation strategies capable to reconsider its correlation and reciprocity. To act procedurally in space, foreseeing the formative capacity of water, and its unique role as poetic revealer of landscape inheritance