c Atzgerei
c Atzgerei
c Atzgerei
c Atzgerei
c Annemarie Arzberger
c Atzgerei
Botanica temporanea – micro landscaping devices – is a project that spans over different scopes: from design, both in public and private sites, to education – always with a very practical twist. B_T aims at enabling a new perception of green spaces by means of originality and surprise, by focussing on alternative greenery. B_T is an experimental endeavour to connect green areas in cities or in densely inhabited suburban sites to each other. B_T revolves around the engagement of the local communities involved, in order to raise environmental awareness and to express a practical evolution of environment-friendly attitudes; at the same time, it aims at educating people on landscape ecology. Simple schemes are designed, that do not aim at creating discomfort or at limiting everyday use or people’s attendance of sites; they will actually enhance the environment by allowing plants and other organisms to populate a site and quietly, peacefully convey biological complexity. The simple rediscovery of draining capabilities, thanks to plants growing on ruins and to pioneer organisms, conveys valuable biological qualities around project sites, by calling attention on biological diversity/complexity that is normally excluded from farmland and from the cities’ arrangement.
The B_T project colonises tarmac and concrete through the natural diffusion of seeds and spores of spontaneous plants in man-made areas, without making a difference between plants that grow spontaneously and those that escape from nearby gardens. After studying the density of gardens and flower-beds in the city, after acknowledging the value of pioneer plants that colonise cracks and abandoned areas on inorganic surfaces every year, we decided to design a network of connections that serves as an itinerary/installation and at the same time provides people with an opportunity to become familiar with a different facet of landscape, connected to ecological networks, to the diffusion of plants and to the cycles of colonisation/adaptation to the urban environment. Showing the surprising outcome of the interaction between the man-made and the spontaneous environments, between functional arrangement and quiet chaos, simply aims at aspiring to a better life.
