Fort Ecologies and the Planetary Terrarium

Between terrariums on a territorial scale and architectural ikebanas, abandoned WWI forts of Trentino-Alto Adige offer a catalogue of spatial situations of interface between landscape and artefact, natural and artificial features. Moving the scale of a terrarium to a planetary one, they reveal the possibility of being interpreted as platforms of support for the emergence of specific geo-ecological formations: during the last 100 years, these forts have been filled, surrounded, crossed, buried, superimposed by a variety of external factors and interspecific contributions (Leoni, 2015). Military archaeologies turned into unconscious ecosystems, ongoing spatial projects based on a comprehensive fusion between local landscape, architectural element and rising ecology. Animal-mineral-botanical presences infiltrated inside / over / around / beside concrete structures, expanding their role and giving rise to a series of geographic objects (Turan, 2020) informed by a self-driven evolution process. Following Le Guin’s carrier bag theory approach (Le Guin, 2020), the contribution analyses a catalogue of architectural situations of contact, support and relationship through which forts turned into artificially manipulated mountain parts, acting as a constellation of punctual and locally defined ecosystems based on various content/container logics. The purpose is to create an abacus of cyborg anatomies (Haraway, 1991), of hybrid landscapes able to build organic on top of the inorganic and acting as sub-strata for incoming soil layers (Czerniak, 2006) and ecologies. These ruins – forgotten objects, wrecks, territorial fragments of waste from a past conflict – turned into prototypes of mutual adaptation between certain animal/botanical species and architecture, displaying a wide set of co-design strategies and ideas for unstable environments. They offer the promise of being self-contained laboratories and open-air tests of a future spatial system based on radical integration, forming the image of a series of architectural terrariums on a planetary scale.