For your building to blend into the natural landscape, have large windows, a lot of open spaces, and plant a lot of trees. When we think of an architecture that responds to nature—that allows us to immerse ourselves into the wonders of the natural world, that fruitfully interacts with nature, while not disrupting it—green architecture and its proponents come to mind. A quick search for "green architecture" on any search engine reveals several images of scant buildings surrounded by trees with buzzwords like carbon neutral often used as justification. Often, this implies that incorporating a bid for sustainable development in some way means more environmentally conscious construction.

Sustainability parameters are often weaponised by developers as a means of profit, a means to attract and please consumers about the benefits of a project that will inevitably extract the planet’s resources. This interest in greens, apart from veiling actual architecture (and its mistakes as Frank Lloyd Wright would dourly comment) also stems from the need to reconcile architecture’s broken relationship with nature. Nature/Architecture. Follies, Shelters, Places of Decompression, a new solo exhibition of illustrations by Ugo La Pietra curated by Piero Tomassoni, at Artvisor, London expands on this dichotomy through the work of the Italian radical, uncategorisable as either architect, artist, researcher or designer.

The architect, designer and artist La Pietra is perhaps best known for his research on the relationship between the individual and their environment through projects that elaborated on a synthesis of the arts spanning conceptual art, sign art, environmental art, new writing, neo-eclecticism and radical design. Self-describing himself as a "researcher in the system of communication and visual arts," or even, an "aesthetic operator with the task of creating unbalance," La Pietra has also taught in many departments of Architecture and Design in Italy. In 1979 he was awarded the Compasso d ‘Oro for research and in 2016 the Compasso d’ Oro for his career.

The exhibition, on till April 20, 2024, presents two of his latest series of works, Forest in the City (2014) and Gazebos (2023—ongoing), that explore how the natural and built environments interact and co-exist (or struggle to). Based on his extensive research on the dynamics between public and private spaces in urban settings, the whimsical illustrations and designs are humorous takes on how contemporary architecture treats greenery, integrating it into developments as a commercial or aesthetic ploy; and not as a real effort to introduce productive green spaces in the city. The Marble Arch Mound in London, a 25-metre-high artificial hill open to the public till the beginning of 2022 comes to mind. Each illustration underscores Pietra’s assumption that “Nature always wins”.

Historically, the relationship between the built and the natural though fraught, has ordered architecture and urban design. Where designers have focused on how the inside relates to the outside and how architecture sits within a context, a desire exists to control nature. This desire to control or to return to nature can be traced back to ideas like Marc-Antoine Laugier’s original fable of the primitive hut, where architecture is born in a forest, and is considered so because of its wild context. It was with growing anxieties over our deteriorating ecology that the green revolution would start considering designs that merged buildings with their landscapes, for instance in the works of SITE, or Emilio Ambasz, and more recently the works of Thomas Heatherwick, Stefano Boeri or Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

As Pietra expands on in his Forest in the City series, the often aestheticised natural element of such projects ignores the fact that nature cannot be controlled. In the simple, inked illustrations, houses sprout branches, leaves, full-grown trees, and roofs are not plastered, but covered in grass and plants. The series draws explicitly on the 'Vertical Forest’ residential complex in Milan, the city where Pietra lives, providing several variations on the theme. Trees peek out of windows, and roofs, they often become the primary structural elements for buildings. In this way, these fantastical residential designs can be seen as a playful subversion of sustainable architecture’s obsession with depicting verdant renderings of forests within buildings.

On the other hand, the designs and illustrations in the Gazebos series are serene, simple watercolours where trees pop out of unexpected places. In one, a chimney-like contraption is overtaken by vines, in another, a pergola system might be completely covered in green. These hypothetical 'places of decompression' in a sense become follies (also alluded to in the exhibition’s title), structures that seem to serve no purpose apart from ornamentation. The folly in itself was a formal response to the growing dichotomy of nature and man, becoming a popular staple of landscape design in the 18^th century.

The interest in gazebos stems from Pietra's research into how individuals interact with their surroundings. The attempt here was to transform these interstitial spaces that order our free time, the time we spend in waiting, through playful interventions. While Gazebos presents fanciful illustrations of places to wait, it further harps on how nature is strictly organised in urban layouts. As Tomassoni comments on the exhibition's display, "We decided to focus on his Gazebos and Forest in the City series as they prompt a reflection on relevant current issues in architecture and urban planning while maintaining the artistic freedom allowed by working with fantastical, non-functional structures and landscapes.

Both series present thought-provoking ideas about the supposed ineffectuality of green architecture, suggesting it only to be surface treatment. Through his work, the Italian designer challenges visitors to reconsider the position from which we imagine architecture. His illustrations ask visitors to think outside of rigid dichotomies, not offering constructed versions of greenery that commercialise nature but instead a more whimsical perspective of how nature might dominate the built.