In the shade of a grey poplar, I watch the tree’s pointless attempt to withstand the end of the summer. The recent days’ winds have left it almost bare, and to reach the trunk I walk on a carpet of silver leaves, feeling the delicate rustle beneath my feet. I pick one up, half crumpled, to discover that the underside was velvety, and so pleasant to touch.
I am in the Amendola Park, on the outskirts of Modena. It is September, and the colours are slowly turning; the greens are less shiny, and swathes of yellow-ochre and red appear here and there. Autumn comes quickly, transforming everything. But it is still a warm day, I notice as I explore the surrounding space, reminiscent of the river landscape of Emilia: small hills like banks along a green river, dotted with small lakes where the bald cypresses dip in their branches, like horses drinking the water.
All around me the park slowly fills with mothers and children, elderly people with carers, ladies with dogs and chattering teenagers strolling along paths made of concrete triangles, circles and rectangles, arranged at short distances from each other, allowing the grass to grow in the gaps, and the tree roots to lift them here and there.
I have come to understand what is the tangible result of the huge research work of Cesare Leonardi (1935-2021) and Franca Stagi (1937-2008) on The architecture of trees, later collected in a large book published in 1982. This is the only city park ever designed and created by the two Modena-based architects together. On his own, between 1990 and 1996, Leonardi oversaw the renovation of the historical ‘Bosco Albergati’ park, in the province of Modena: 40 hectares of land, repopulated according to a landscape model (Non-centred Reticular Structure) based on research into the architecture of trees.
In my notebook I have written a quote by Franca Stagi that I wanted to see for myself. “You have to know trees to design parks; know them one by one, and also know that designing a park means designing a transformation, proposing a mechanism of transformation, growth, life and death,” she wrote in her book.
And what I found proves this. The park was designed in 1972, and inaugurated nine years later, and the passing time has made it even more beautiful. Today it is a harmonious mix of different, carefully selected botanical species: a total of 1135 trees and 633 shrubs, arranged over an area measuring almost 11 hectares with two lakes. The trees that have been living here for half a century – linden and oak, mulberry and ash, walnut, acacia and many more – are now mature specimens that love being part of a community. I can see their crowns lean towards each other, continuously needing to feel each other’s presence; I imagine their thinner roots intertwining underground, communicating the pleasure of the water that comes from the sky or sending an alarm when parasites are near.
“Decades will pass before we can see the exact proportion between the meadows and the trees […] between the people and the crowns of the trees, between paths in the sun and paths in the shade; before we can really perceive the sense of that space,” Cesare Leonardi adds in another page. The pair had calculated everything: the height of the trees they had selected, the size and colour of the crown through the seasons, the shade projected on the ground when planted alone or in groups. This park is the result of everything that Cesare and Franca knew, and what they knew would happen.
Among the first to understand the importance of their long research on trees were two of Leonardi’s students, the architects Giulio Orsini and Andrea Cavani, today part of the group of promoters of the Archive that bears his name. “Everything began in 1962-1963 with the photographic sequence of the Carpinus betulus, a large hornbeam in the Park of Remembrance in Modena, right opposite the windows of their firm,” Orsini explains. “Leonardi photographed the hornbeam four times in every season: today, the large collage of 16, now-faded photographs hangs on the wall of his office, today home to the Archive.”
But how does this attention to trees fit into the panorama of the many activities of Cesare Leonardi, painter and photographer, architect and designer, sculptor and inventor? “He began to investigate this at the University of Florence, where he was studying architecture under Leonardo Savioli. From there, it became one of his great passions,” Cavani continues. “He worked on some very in-depth research areas, almost obsessively and never sporadically. With all the rigour and method that has been lost today. His interest for something could last for decades, shifting from one field to the next, one subject to the next, one love story to the next. Always following the idea of being able to cross over into different fields.”
“In fact, his passion for trees influenced many other activities,” Cavani continues, “because trees are dynamism, they are organisms that mark the vital rhythm of the seasons and, with their shade, even mark the passing of time, and Leonardi transferred this dynamism into his sculptures.” In a design piece celebrated in 1972 at the MoMA in New York, like the The Rocking Chair; in his photographic works on the Shadows of Modena or Solids, a collection of different chairs developed from the same wooden material.”
Returning to the book, its title contains two words that are apparently in contrast. Architecture belongs to Culture, to Humans; Trees are an expression of Nature. While the first is static, made of stone, concrete, glass and steel, trees on the other hand are constantly changing living beings; for the authors, studying their architectural dimension means moving in uncharted territory.
In his research into the ideal tree, Cesare Leonardi travelled across Italy, starting from Florence and Modena and then moving farther afield. Then he went to France, Switzerland and Great Britain; finally, he went to Guatemala and Mexico, wanting to photograph only trees that had never been pruned and could show off all their natural, primordially beautiful crown. To photograph deciduous trees, Leonardi would return several times, in spring-summer and autumn-winter, almost as if attending fashion shows.
Leonardi and Stagi gathered and catalogued a huge amount of photographic material and then, with the help of their assistants, produced 392 data sheets, on 212 tree species belonging to 128 genera, and 53 families divided into Gymnospermae, Dicotyledons and Monocotyledons. The book’s more than 400 pages include 370 drawings of specimens in scale 1:100 and 185 details of leaves and fruits in scale 1:5. There are no photographs of trees, only drawings taken from photographs: a precise choice, consciously taking each specimen on board only after having portrayed it for days, leaf by leaf, with slow and painstaking precision.
The Architecture of Trees, republished in 2018, is a manual adopted in many universities around the world and today, decades later, it remains a cornerstone text for landscape designers. Following the teachings of the two architects, in April Orsini and Cavani launched the Alberi Festival in Modena. Practical suggestions were discussed for a week, with a view to making cities more liveable, consciously planting and respecting these green giants that help to fight climate change.Cesare and Franca would have liked to meet so many people.
