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The Giardino Sonoro is the name of our Team of Environmental Designers based in Florence (Tuscany) and that of our Sonic Garden laboratory site. Here we conduct in-house ground tests on new installations and study and develop acoustic-luminous prototypes (EEM – Expressive and Environmental Modules).
Contextually composed and designed acoustic/musical, horticultural and luminous components are the primary instruments applied by the Giardino Sonoro in restructuring and transfiguring architectural and naturalistic spaces.
These elements induce an extension of the ambiance’s capacity to express dynamically both public and individual symbolic contents, thus imparting an altered cognitive perspective on the Habitat.
The three major areas of application intended for our installational modules –EEMs- are interior design, urban planning and landscape architecture.

INTERIOR DESIGN:

our criteria of planning aims to transfigure interior space rewriting the relationship between lighting, sound and ambience as the capacity, the sense and the imperiousness of material architecture are rendered dynamic and transposable.

URBAN PLANNING:

the application of our EEMs increases habitability in the chaotic urban acoustic environment by actively directing the individual’s typically submissive perception towards sources emitting musical-formal sonic compositions, thus diminishing his exposition to the invasive urban noise. The perceived environment is hence redefined as a readable and cognitively immersive habitat.

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE:

Through the process of adaptation of the artificial—i.e. sound, lights and other functional modules, the Giardino Sonoro, like any landscape planner past and present, aims to achieve an informative compositional hybrid of the natural environment. The aim is inhabiting immersively and expressively the natural context, exposing its internal – botanical and symbolic – constellations, writing new livable living articulations.
Co-design is one of our main methodological issues. The relationship with other designers and architects enhances the value and perspective of our modular approach to the space composition.

Towards a symbolic architecture..

On the SONIC GARDEN
THE LEMONERY OF THE IMPERIALINO:

“The spirits of those who never in their time foresweared a pledge walk erratic in blissful fields where flowers never bend, nor flatten under feet: in honour of pledges kept an eternal garden flourishes.”
(Euripides, Ippolytus, 73-83)

Without a life that never will foreswear a pledge a great many flowers would still grow only in the fertile regions of Mesopotamia, where they were discovered by patient monks, driven by the oath of true life, who brought them to us, all the way to the cold northern terrains. The flowers, patiently acclimatized and reproduced, soon became a vital source of precious medicine for the body while their beautiful forms soothed the eye and mind.
Here, in this ancient bet of love, the art of the gardener was sown. Here, too, lies the kernel of his most fundamental tool: the experimental garden, the greenhouse, the seedbed…different terms that all express the single concept of the garden of intentions. The potential of matter at its purest state formed by the passion of the gardener to offer itself to man.
The Giardino Passerotti, and subsequently the Giardino Sonoro La Limonaia dell’Imperialino that envelops it today, exist for these reasons. Rather, they exist solely for these reasons. Located where the baroque alignment of the Viale della Villa Del Poggio Imperiale fans out on the scenic masterpiece of the Poggiano del Viale dei Colli, they were contrived in one of the most noble pastures of the modern Florentine scenery, contiguous to the lemonery of the historic Villa dell’Imperialino. The Limonaia dell’Imperialino is at the heart of a tessellation of gardens reared by age-old traditions: the monastic officinal gardens, the hortus conclusus conventionally adjoining the palazzo signorili (a custom that later developed into the mannerist secret gardens and the experimental orchards), and still, the tradition of the “useful gardens” that would subsequently give birth to some of the most refined and grandiose renaissance and baroque gardens.
The Giardino Passerotti, sown in 2001, is an example of how this fundamental tool of every gardener can be reinterpreted according to a wholly contemporary sensitivity. A sensitivity that reconnects with the distinguished horticultural tradition of Florence, exemplified by the Botanical Garden at Boboli or the experimental orchards in Cascine Park, both associated to Attilio Pucci, an illustrious exponent of the most famous family of Florentine gardeners of the 19th Century.
The rigor of tradition, evolved through centuries of gardening, has wrought the arena of the Giardino Passerotti; a very prominent collection of more than 450 variations of erbacee perenni.
Today, the garden of the Limonaia dell’Imperialino disseminates an inherent characteristic of a passionate bet at the fringes of possibility by accepting the challenges of a permanent laboratory where the natural material interacts with the arts of sound, light and visual arts through experimentation of virtuoso modes and practices. Contemporary sensitivity reconnecting to a typically mannerist ancient tradition according to which scents, colours, water, air and sound together create complex realities of continuous and fluid transmutation. This is the birth of the Giardino Sonoro La Limonaia dell’Imperialino, thanks to the collaboration of Lorenzo Brusci of Timet.