V-ZUG Inspirations Magazine - Magazine - Page 68
FOR THE LOVE OF TREES
66
“I began to look at trees differently, to climb them,
to want to be with them and understand
how they worked, how they lived.”
In the Bible, humanity becomes self-aware when Adam
and Eve eat the forbidden apple in the Garden of Eden.
You, on the other hand, understood what you wanted to do
in life thanks to a peach. And not just any peach… I was
seven years old and, during school holidays, my mother would
take me to my grandfather’s house in Cesena, Italy. We would
get up at four in the morning, and I would accompany him by
bike to work: he dug wells and built fountains. At noon my
grandmother made cappelletti in broth, because we had been
sweating and needed something light and salty. Then around
four in the afternoon, after finishing work, we would go to his
garden: a small plot of land with vegetables, fruit trees, rabbits… We hoed the soil, tended and watered the plants, and my
grandfather would smoke a cigarette. Once I picked a peach
from a small tree–it was a variety that is now extinct, a Bella
di Cesena, as big as a child’s head–and took a bite. I asked
my grandpa, “How can this peach be so big and so good?”
He looked at me and said, “If you are good to nature, nature
gives everything back to you.” That sentence grew inside me. I
began to look at trees differently, to climb them, to want to be
with them and understand how they worked, how they lived.
Your grandfather built fountains. Your father designed
and imported terracotta pots from Italy to Switzerland.
You chose to work with gardens. So you moved from the
object to the context. From design to architecture. How
did that happen? My father emigrated from Italy to Switzerland as a young man. He collaborated with Italian sculptors
to craft staircases, balustrades, and windowsills. To meet the
demands of the Swiss climate, he began developing frost-resistant terracotta pots, which he successfully introduced to
gardens and terraces throughout Switzerland. That’s how the
family business was born. I studied Industrial Design nearby,
then Landscape Architecture in London. In 1985 I moved to
Maui, Hawaii, to create gardens for a Sheraton hotel. There,
ENZO ENEA
Enzo Enea is the founder of Enea
Landscape Architecture, an international landscape architecture
and horticulture company headquartered in Rapperswil-Jona,
with offices in Zurich, New York,
Miami, and Milan. With a team
of 240 employees from multiple
backgrounds, the award-winning
firm works across a range of
scales–from private residences
to hotels, real estate developments, cultural institutions and
masterplans–creating sustainable landscape design that aims
to positively influence the local
microclimates and counteract the
effects of climate change.
nature was almost magical. In the morning I would wake up,
step outside, shower outdoors, and not return home until
evening. That year I surfed and got my pilot’s license. I saw the
island from above, in the air, and from the water. I tried to read
it and understand it: the winds, the volcano, the waterfalls,
the tropical biodiversity… It was perhaps the most powerful
experience of my life. But when my father called to tell me he
was going to stop working, I decided to return and take over
the family business. The first thing I did was break down all
the low-value pots and use the shards to create a terracotta
terrace. That was the moment I moved from the object to the
space that contained it. And it worked.
The history of gardens oscillates between controlling
nature and liberating it. Which of these approaches is
closer to your sensibility? And why? For a long time, green
space was conceived mainly to be looked at, contemplated
from a distance, like a painting. The French garden, for example, is based on grand avenues and perfectly trimmed hedges
–a concept of absolute domination over nature. In England,
instead, many houses were built near forests, which provided
construction timber. The most majestic trees, such as oaks
and beeches, were left standing. Goats were allowed to graze
freely nearby, shaping a more natural landscape. Closer to the
house, there would be the orchard, the vegetable garden, and
flowers. For me, that is the garden. It must be lived in, crossed,
used in everyday life. In my work I call this concept outside
in: outdoor spaces designed for human activities. Usually
people call an architect to design a villa, and only afterwards
think about the garden. I prefer to consider the entire available
perimeter: the outside as a place in dialogue with the inside.
Sometimes it’s enough to rotate a wall by a few degrees and
lightly prune a branch to enjoy the shade of a tree, which acts
as a natural air conditioner.
