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7/5/2004

Premio Internazionale Carlo Scarpa per il Giardino

Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche, Treviso

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Quindicesima Edizione - 2004.

Cerimonia pubblica della quindicesima edizione del Premio Internazionale Carlo Scarpa per il Giardino.

La giuria internazionale, presieduta da Lionello Puppi, e composta da Sven-Ingvar Andersson, Carmen Añón, Domenico Luciani, Monique Mosser e Ippolito Pizzetti, attribuisce annualmente il premio a un luogo denso di natura e di memoria, con caratteristiche esemplari nella sua concezione e nel suo governo.
''Un luogo - spiega Domenico Luciani, direttore della Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche- occupa uno spazio, ha un sito e una postura. E' forma e vita in continua modificazione. E' temporalità e commensurabilità spaziale. Comporta una responsabilità per la salvaguardia della sua identità.''
Il premio segnala non tanto il talento dell'inventore del luogo, ma la sapienza e la continuità nel governo del luogo stesso, sapienza e continuità che riescono a far vivere nel tempo quella stessa invenzione, a ritrovarla, a rinnovarla facendola rimanere se stessa, in equilibrio tra innovazione e conservazione.
Non a caso, il premio è intitolato a Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978), inventore di spazi aperti, che ha ideato, tra gli altri, il cortile di Castelvecchio a Verona, il giardino della Fondazione Querini Stampalia a Venezia, il giardino-sepolcro Brion a San Vito d'Altivole, Treviso.
Il premio consiste in una campagna di attenzioni, che si articola nella pubblicazione di un dossier, nella raccolta di materiali bibliografici e cartografici pertinenti, nell'organizzazione della cerimonia pubblica che anche quest'anno si svolge a Treviso, nella sede della Fondazione Benetton, sabato 8 maggio alle ore 17.
Il riconoscimento simbolico è costituito da un sigillo, disegnato da Carlo Scarpa, che viene conferito alla persona o alla istituzione responsabile del governo del luogo designato.

La giuria ha deciso di dedicare la quindicesima edizione del Premio Internazionale Carlo Scarpa per il Giardino, 2004 a:
Kongenshus Mindepark

Territorio di milleduecento ettari di brughiera, tra i pochi sopravissuti nello Jutland (Danimarca) alla secolare bonifica, Kongenshus Mindepark è stato dichiarato parco della memoria proprio per iniziativa degli agricoltori.
Tra il 1945 e il 1953 il paesaggista Carl Theodor Sørensen (1893-1979) e l'architetto Hans Georg Skovgaard (1898-1969) vengono incaricati di dare forma memoriale a una delle piccole valli di origine glaciale presenti all'interno del parco. Nasce la valle della memoria, pietra miliare del paesaggismo del Novecento, inaugurata il 10 giugno 1953 alla presenza di Re Frederik IX e della regina Ingrid
Trentanove massi istoriati e iscritti con i nomi delle comunità e delle famiglie che lavorarono alla bonifica, e pietre più piccole, vengono collocati lungo una valle che - leggermente sinuosa e con morbide sponde - solca la brughiera e si conclude in un'ampia ellisse dove ogni anno migliaia di danesi si incontrano per ricordare la lunga storia delle trasformazioni della loro terra e la vicenda dei contadini che ne operarono la bonifica.

Cerimonia pubblica della quindicesima edizione del
Premio Internazionale Carlo Scarpa per il Giardino:
Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche
Treviso, auditorium di palazzo Bomben, via Cornarotta 7
Sabato 8 maggio 2004 ore 17.00

Informazioni:
Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche
via Cornarotta 9, 31100 Treviso, tel.+39.0422.5121, fax +39.0422.579483

Ufficio stampa Studio Pesci
via G.Petroni, 18/3 - 40126 Bologna tel 051 269 267 fax 051 296 0748 info@studiopesci.it

---english

International Prize Carlo Scarpa for the Garden 2004

Saturday 8h May 2004 at 5.00 p.m., in Treviso in the Benetton Foundation, a public ceremony will take place for the 15th edition of the International Prize Carlo Scarpa for the Garden.

The international Jury, with the following members: Sven-Ingvar Andersson, Carmen Añòn (vice-president), Domenico Luciani (co-ordinator), Monique Mosser, Ippolito Pizzetti, Lionello Puppi (president); assign every year its prize to a location replete with nature and memory, with exemplary features in terms of design and management.

"A place - explains Domenico Luciani, director of Benetton Foundation, Studies and Research- occupies a space, with a location and a standing; constantly changing shape and life, spatial timing and measure. Safekeeping its identity requires responsibility."

The award points not solely to the talent of the designer, but also to the knowledge and continuity needed for the management and maintenance of the invention, capable of perpetuating it in time, while renovating it as well as keeping it true to itself in an ever-ending balancing act between innovation and conservation.

This is why the award is named after Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978), great inventor and designer of outdoor spaces, who designed the courtyard of Castelvecchio in Verona, the garden of Querini Stampalia Foundation in Venice, the extraordinary Brion sepulchre-garden in San Vito d'Altivole, Treviso.

The prize consists in a campaign of focussed information, with the publication of a dossier, the collection of relevant bibliographic materials and maps, the earmarking of a financial contribution of twenty thousand Euro, and the organisation of a public awarding ceremony. The symbolic prize is a seal designed by Carlo Scarpa, and awarded to the person or institution responsible for the management of the chosen garden; the seal is etched with the name of the site chosen by the Jury.

The Jury decided to dedicate
The 15th edition of The International Prize Carlo Scarpa for the Garden, 2004 to:

Kongenshus Mindepark
Territory of one thousand two hundred hectares of moor, amongst those few that survived the centuries-old decontamination in Jutland (Denmark), Kongenshus Mindepark was declared Memory Park because of the initiative of the farmers.

Between 1945 and 1953 the landscapist Carl Theodor Sørensen (1893-1979) and the architect Hans Georg Skovgaard (1898-1969) were entrusted of giving a memorial form to one of the small glacial valleys inside the park. The Memory Valley was born, milestone of the 20th century landscapism, the park opened June 10th 1953 with the attendance of King Frederik IX and Queen Ingrid.

Thirty nine illustrated blocks engraved with the names of the communities and families that worked for the decontamination, and smaller rocks, are placed along a valley that - slightly winding and with soft banks - ploughs the moor and ends in wide ellipse where every year thousand of Danish meet to remember the long history of the transformations of their land and the vicissitude of the farmers that decontaminated it.

Reasoning of the Jury
The jury of the Premio Internazionale Carlo Scarpa per il Giardino has unanimously decided to bestow the 15th award, in 2004, on Kongenshus Mindepark, a tract of 1.200 hectares of heath located in the south of Viborg, Jutland (Denmark), witness to a long history of ideas and deeds, the inspiration for some astonishingly inventive landscape art.

A significant - and singular - set of events led during the first half of the 20th century to the protection of certain locations, including Kongenshus, which survived the agrarian transformation and land reclamation affecting much of the western part of the peninsula, following the Danish defeat in 1864 and the ensuing loss of Schleswig. This transformation came to be regarded as a true patriotic act.

What is significant is not so much the genesis of the idea of the heath's beauty, which belongs to the broader European movement towards a new love of nature that developed throughout the 19th century, fostered by artistic élites, in particular by painters, cultured individuals, travellers, naturalists and curious anthropologists.

What is more significant is the fact that the State feels a duty to protect heath landscapes, so much so that the first restrictions appeared in 1903. Even more noteworthy is the fact that the idea of their value as a "heritage" appeared very early in the mentality of the Danish people, taking hold in the public consciousness and becoming capable of producing tangible initiatives. Indeed there is evidence that, as early as 1911, a group of Danish emigrants bought a tract of heath and donated it to the public authorities "on condition that it is preserved for ever in its natural state".

But what is particularly striking, and almost paradoxical, is the fact that the initiative to safeguard and give value to the heath as a place of "memory" was fostered by the very workers who transformed it into agricultural land. In 1930 their associations proposed buying surviving tracts in order to guarantee their protection. A similar proposal resurfaced in 1937, with a call for the creation of a park dedicated to the memory of the heath's inhabitants and the workers engaged in its transformation; the idea finally came to fruition in 1941 with the creation of an estate of 1.214 hectares corresponding to the present-day Kongenshus.

Yet just when, around 1945, a bright and windy expanse of moorland was dedicated to the aim of preserving and representing the collective memory, that love of nature which had brought about the protection of surviving tracts of heath was already being re-thought and enriched by the idea that in Denmark, like almost everywhere in the world, nature itself is a testimony to the past.

To Carl Theodor Sørensen, the great Danish landscape architect who was entrusted with this task, to his colleague, the architect Hans Georg Skovgaard, to the clients with whom a dialogue was taken up, the historicity of nature, and of its consequences, is powerfully represented by Kongenshus.
Heath landscape predated the agrarian landscape, yet it was not the original condition of these locations. Before there was heath there was forest, as many place-names give us to understand. The forest, itself planted at least in part by human hand, was destroyed in the protohistoric era - through climate change and through deforestation carried out by man. Human beings then exploited the land through intensive cultivation and grazing, until its fertility was exhausted and it turned into heath. The historicity of nature is a concept that rebuts the idea of moorland being an original feature.

We therefore have a responsibility to preserve a heath landscape, and we now realise that without proper maintenance, without fire and grazing, the heath would revert to forest.

The indissoluble link between the place, its form, its life and the community responsible for it now becomes clear: Kongenshus will be heathland only as long as the public authorities so wish and ensure that it happens.

In Sørensen's modern vision of landscaping, Kongenshus, as an historic natural environment, lent itself to further change. Therefore, between 1945 and 1953, the year of its inauguration in the presence of the Danish royal family, the Kongenshus heath became Kongenshus Mindepark. After having appropriately put aside thoughts of erecting monuments, after having considered creating a glade in an artificial arboretum (harking back to the forest phase), Sørensen discovered the solution following prolonged, silent, on-the-spot ruminations. He found, and concentrated his artistic energy on, the small signs left on the ground by melting glacier waters: gullies ranging from one to a few kilometres in length, which descend to about 15 meters below the level of the countryside, enough to completely change our perception of horizon and, between two banks of violet heather, come into direct contact with the clear light of a sky swept clean by the heath wind.

One of these small gullies became Mindedal, the valley of memory. Along the slope, at regular 20 meter intervals, there are 39 rocks decorated and inscribed with references to the history of the land reclamation. At the end, seventy stones inscribed with commemorative names and sentences mark out an elliptical space around which thousands of people come together every year to remember those who lived on the heath and those who worked there using all available means to reclaim it and to win over the land for agriculture and forestry. More stones have been laid on the ground at various points along the slopes and in the clearing; they tell us tales of places from the ancient Viking world, and speak to us of a topography and a history which predated the heath and even the forest. The expanse of moorland does not lose its attraction, yet, in the plot of this story, we also see it as the result of a misuse of fertile land by man. And it becomes even more beautiful, since it ultimately appears as a fragile and temporary artifice.

Sørensen and Skovgaard define the place of memory through the memory of a place, thereby creating a masterpiece in the "modern Nordic landscape tradition".

The gesture made in Kongenshus by means of a very small modification to the landscape (though one capable of stunning intensity) is critical in revealing the signs and meanings evoked, and is thus an example of that marvellous and rare combination of sensuality and symbolism, of emotion and intelligence, which is the very essence of art.

Sven-Ingvar Andersson, Carmen Añón, Domenico Luciani,Monique Mosser, Ippolito Pizzetti, Lionello Puppi, 8 May 2004

Promoting Institution:
Benetton Foundation Studies Research

International Jury:
Sven-Ingvar Andersson, landscape artist, professor emeritus at the Royal Danish Fine Arts Academy
Carmen Añòn, teacher at Madrid University, honorary president of the International Committee for Historical Gardens of ICOMOS (International Council Monuments Sites)
Domenico Luciani, director of Benetton Foundation, Studies and Research, Treviso, president of the International Centre for Water Civilisation, Jury co-ordinator
Monique Mosser, teacher of the Versailles School of Architecture, CNRS, member of the International Committee for Historical Gardens of ICOMOS
Ippolito Pizzetti, landscape artist, essayist, teacher at Ferrara University
Lionello Puppi, art historian, Venice, Jury president

Event: Public ceremony of the fifteenth edition of the Carlo Scarpa International Garden Award

Date: Saturday 8th May 2004 ; 5,00 p.m.
Awarding ceremony at: Benetton Foundation, Studies and Research, Bomben and Caotorta palaces, via Cornarotta 7, 31100 Treviso

Information: Benetton Foundation, Studies and Research, Bomben palace, via Cornarotta 9, 31100 Treviso

Press office: Studio Pesci, via G.Petroni 18/3°, 40126 Bologna tel. 0039-051-269267, fax:0039-051-2960748 info@studiopesci.it - http://www.studiopesci.it

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