To the River and Back

Magenta sits in the heart of Italy with a deep-rooted historic centre and a set of very contemporary problems: air pollution, inefficient waste management, and congestion produced by rapid urbanisation pressing against a town that was not built for it. The Ticino runs nearby, and the town has largely stopped using it.

The work is about getting back to the river. It builds a circulation system that makes the riverside reachable from the urban centre, and it treats the farmland in between as part of the design rather than as the gap between two destinations.

The centrepiece is a table we called The Chess — a seasonal landscape programme mapping farmers, ranchers, students, the general public, livestock, winter and spring crops, floral meadows, rice, grass and water across the whole year. It let us align every intervention with the rhythm the place already has, so the landscape stays occupied in February as well as July.

Two structures carry the design. A tower, because the site is flat and the tallest things in it are trees, elevates the view far enough to take in the river on one side and the fields on the other. A bridge crosses a riverbed that is dry for half the year, so it is designed to work wet and dry — less a crossing than an active piece of the terrain.

Before any of it, we made postcards on site: Gridded Memories, a set of drawings recording light, smell and temperature, because the first impression of a place is usually the most accurate one and the easiest to lose.