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Water remains a fundamental pillar of the architectural imagination. This talk avoids a standard historical overview of water in design, opting instead to analyze what we define as the "states of water"—liquid, solid, and gaseous—and their specific inspirations for the built environment. The second part confronts the urgent paradigm shift caused by the global climate crisis, exploring how the architectural community has pioneered a holistic synergy between landscape and architecture where water is no longer a threat to be managed but a vital resource for reimagining urban projects.

In fact, my memoir is actually titled Mari. It takes a special look at the Tyrrhenian Sea and my life in Sicily, the Indian Ocean and my life in Mozambique, and my great love for Brazil and the Pacific Ocean. If there are five people among you who would like to read it, I swear I will translate it into English for you. Just let me know..

Architecture and Water

Let’s look at a few examples. Take, for instance, the grand tradition that began in 16th-century Roman gardens—such as Giacomo del Duca’s work at the Palazzo Farnese gardens in Caprarola. This tradition later evolved into the magnificent urban scenography of Baroque Rome, famously expressed through its monumental fountains and water features. Here, water and architecture coexist in a powerful symbiosis of artifice and nature

The first is that of the Baroque city, with its aqueducts, conduits, and the Trevi Fountain. Here, the scenographic forms of architecture and those of water hybridize, intertwining with one another.

In Bernini’s Fontana del Tritone (Triton Fountain, 1642–1643), there is a clear desire to bring water into the city not merely as a practical utility or a theatrical backdrop, but as a fundamental necessity of myth—the storytelling of water itself. There are dozens of such examples in Rome, including the Trevi Fountain, the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi (Fountain of the Four Rivers) in Piazza Navona, and the Barcaccia at the foot of the Spanish Steps.

The second image, familiar to everyone, is the pool of water in Mies van der Rohe's pavilion—a sheet of water that becomes a flat plane within a unified composition.

And the third image is, of course, Fallingwater By Frnk Lyod Wrigh (1936)The movements of the water and the waterfall are translated into a fiercely alternative, mechanical, and modern language that captures its dynamic essence, making the planes rotate and glide past each other like the blades of a mill.

And yet, it is not this classic approach that interests me the most, but rather a line of reasoning based first and foremost on the movements we make with water.

There are three of them.

Swimming/surfing on the surface is the first movement. This is a well-known attitude of which, indeed, I gave some previews in the first part, and we could go on. But it is one thing to swim, which serves to see horizons and profiles, and another thing to surf, which serves to pirouette and be ready to leap into the next wave. Now, this has always seemed to me, how shall I put it, an end in itself.

The other two fundamental movements are diving in and, above all, jumping.

1. Swimming/Looking.

Lines are drawn, profiles are made, coastlines are observed. These images, like the following ones, are from 'Amerzone' (Casterman), by author Benoît Sokal.

Of landscape, nature, and water in this context.

"Landscape, as a fundamental paradigm of architectural creation, has become a key reference term, thanks in part to this line of reflection on residual spaces. Post-industrial, electronic-age humanity can now re-evaluate its relationship with nature; for while the manufacturing industry sought to dominate and exploit natural resources, the information industry can add value to them. At least in technologically advanced countries, this structural shift opens up an opportunity for a 'compensation' of historical proportions. In areas often built to extremely high densities, we can now inject greenery, nature, and leisure facilities. But beware: this is not about circumscribing and fencing off green areas to contrast them with residential, commercial, or administrative zones, as was the logic of organizing-by-dividing in the industrial city. On the contrary, it is about creating new, integrated urban fragments where a strong presence of nature coexists with the interacting set of activities characteristic of the information society. Here too, the tools change. If zoning was the method used to plan the industrial city through division into homogeneous, distinct zones—mimicking the Taylorist concept of industrial production—multi-functionality and integration have become the necessity of the information city and its new anti-zoning areas. Moreover, information technology not only creates these opportunities but also enables their realization: interactive lighting, information, sound, and control systems that make these new urban fragments active, lively, participatory, and rich in events.

The nature toward which this conception of landscape looks is no longer the floral or Art Nouveau style, nor even that of the masters of organicism. It has become much more complex, much fiercer, much more 'hidden,' as Heraclitus once said. Architects explore it with an anti-romantic eye through the new formalisms of contemporary science (fractals, DNA, atoms, the leaps of an expanding universe, the relationship between life and matter). In short, the category of complexity. In this context, figures of flows, waves, whirlpools, crevices, and liquid crystals emerge, and Fluidity becomes the keyword. It describes the constant flux of information and brings architecture face-to-face with the most advanced frontiers of research, from biology to engineering, and into new, fertile areas of overlap such as morphogenesis, bioengineering, and so forth."

From A. Saggio, "A Manifesto for an Architecture of Information. New Substances: Information Technology and the Renewal of Architecture", "Il Progetto" n.6, January 2000, pp. 32-35.

      2. Immersion.

An immersion in search of the essence of substances—and the substance of renewal is information technology."

ù

"Next-generation architects are working to understand how the dynamic, interconnected, and mutable models at the very heart of the information revolution can transmigrate into an architecture that serves as their reification. If this research constitutes the horizon of a new phase of architecture, its raw material—the water that nourishes this research and moves in waves, whirlpools, eddies, and waterfalls—is called information. The raw material of a new phase of architecture." From Antonino Saggio, "Information: The Raw Material of Architecture", Op. Cit., n. 118, September 2003, pp. 5-10 and    A.S., Thoughts On the Information Technology Revoluzion in Architecture, Vita Nostra Edizioni, Rome 2023

"If in computer science data do not exist, but only information, then in IT everything is in formation [in the process of taking shape]. This phrasing touches the core of the problem: that information is truly 'in formation'—in constant, dynamic, inexhaustible movement and becoming! It also tells us that the realm in which this occurs is precisely the electronic one. Therefore, information is, by definition, a fluid mass that has 'yet' to take shape. And here the Zingarelli dictionary comes to our aid: to inform means 'to model according to a form' and information represents 'the acts' of this modeling (Nicola Zingarelli, Vocabolario della lingua Italiana, 10th ed., Zanichelli Bologna 1970). Hence, we arrive at formulation [6]: if in IT everything is in formation, the shaping of information is defined as modeling, and it expresses itself through the creation of models. The model is then the form that information assumes, the form into which information is modeled." From Antonino Saggio, "Information: The Raw Material of Architecture", Op. Cit., n. 118, September 2003, pp. 5-10 and  A.S., Thoughts On the Information Technology Revoluzion in Architecture, Vita Nostra Edizioni, Rome 2023.

Here the translation already Exists:

3. But it is the third movement that is the fundamental one, it is that of the jump. Jumping.

S

I have spoken about this far too many times lately. Perhaps it is worth remembering only this:

"Thus, it is proven that there is no absolute space and time at all, but rather that each system is spatiotemporally autonomous and dependent on the frame of reference used. This diversity of space and time across different frames of reference is proven here in the absence of reciprocal motion—a feature that distinguishes this demonstration from Einstein’s theory of special relativity.

On my desktop, I have an image by Benoit Sokal featuring a whale leaping out of the water's surface. This image can be linked to the reasoning on 'how' to perceive another dimension when one is, in some way, confined to a lower one. In this specific case, how can a fish, restricted 'solely' to being inside the water, 'perceive' or understand what lies outside that liquid, and actually describe or imagine coasts, gulfs, and beaches? Naturally, as we have come to understand, it can do so with a leap outside its own dimension. The figure of the leap is fundamental to perceiving another dimension and to understanding—and at the same time, seeing—one's own. But the impact of the leap is not merely perceptual; it is not just an incredible broadening of vision and reason. Above all, it is the beginning of understanding the rules of other reference systems, of other spaces, of other times, and most importantly—and here we bring architecture back into play—of other value systems. Within this arduous territory, in this atmosphere thin on oxygen, we are slowly moving: it is the realm of the quest for aesthetic knowledge. There is enough here, I believe, to make the move into four dimensions." From Antonino Saggio, "Time, Time: The First Dimension of Space" in "Il Progetto" n. 19, 2004 and  A.S., Thoughts On the Information Technology Revoluzion in Architecture, Vita Nostra Edizioni, Rome 2023.

Here lies the incredible power of water: it grants us the moment of the leap, of the change of state—which, as you have understood, is not merely physical, but perceptual, physical, and logical.

2 Liquid.

This is, of course, the fluid manifestation of waves, whirlpools, and erosive movements found in so many works inspired by Frank Gehry. Yet, in Gehry's work, there is also a distinct liquid form—one that I myself have defined as "submarine."



 
Pict David Egan

Frank O. Gehry, MOPOP – Museum of Pop Culture (Inizialmente inaugurato come Experience Music Project – EMP) ,1995–2000. Seattle

And a submarine Interpretation

 Frank O. Gehry (Gehry Partners) with Philip Johnson. Peter Lewis House Lyndhurst, Cleveland Ohio 1985 – 1995 (11 years of numberless variants )

here again a Book exists

 
  And the third stage? Naturally, after the frozen state and the liquid stage, the gaseous state must follow. And here we have the prodigious example of Diller and Scofidio, which naturally and indissolubly links this condition to computer science.

"One might ask how the building manages to move in the world of

dynamic interconnections and interactivity so present in our

everyday digital existence? Here the idea itself of a building as a

static, closed, autonomous and basically non-reactive entity has

been eliminated. The building is an element of transformation, it

changes as conditions change, and as the program deciding which

input to use (in this case meteorological variations) and which

output to generate (in this case the intensity of the sprays)

changes. "

THE MENTAL LANDSCAPE, PREFACE OF ANTONINO SAGGIO TO ANTONELLO MAOTTA DILLER&SCOFIDIO BLURRED THEATER , EDILSTAMPA 2011

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Diller e Scofidio, Blur, Expo svizzera 2002