Landscape Continuity: Cultivating Different Allegories of the Inseparable

As urgent as the call for action may appear, cultivating the continuity of European landscape imposes a different theory of action, as does any cultivation, one that is the opposite of the urgency to build, produce, interfere or perform at any cost. Cultivation is intended as a ‘fine calibration’ of the measure of doing, driven by care, attention or even devotion in order to maintain or promote the growth and sustainment of life. As its etymology indicates, cultivation is also about knowledge that is applied to ‘refine inhabiting’. That is to say, if cultivated, inhabiting is performed at such a level it enables the spirit of care to nourish and even embellish life by rewarding us with ‘fruits and flowers’, with the ‘useful and delightful’. And when inhabiting also nourishes beauty, in other words all the dimensions of existence beyond the simplistic function of dwelling, then it is also honoured as a celebration of life itself. After all, do we have to kneel in the garden to benefit from cut herbs or picked flowers? It is an everyday ritual of devotion to the realm of the earthly and domestic. Beyond any celestial or Edenic order, the reverence due comes from a deeply embedded and rooted earthly presence like the beautiful ancient tree in a picture by Sebastião Salgado, the epitome of the UNISCAPE initiative. Inhabiting as a ‘deeply rooted presence’ is thus far from being simply the occupation of soil or a step forward from the ‘art of building’ as architectural practice is typically defined; as a ‘deeply rooted presence’, inhabiting turns out to be an ‘art of living’ that is literally palpable with our own flesh because, in practice, it is experienced as art-of-life nourishment generated together with the multitude of living beings performing their living on a tiny earthly substrate.