“There may have been fogs for centuries in London … But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till Art had invented them.”
— Wilde, Oscar. “The Decay of Lying.” In Intentions. London: James R. Osgood, McIlvaine & Co., 1891.
“I like to think that design, likewise art, makes connections between ‘things,’ making them appear. We catalyze relationships among things, including ourselves. It is not about water, soil, wind, sunlight, plants or animals in themselves, but rather ensuring they’re in symbiosis. And once these connections are in place, each ‘thing’ sustains the others: sunlight makes water evaporate into the atmosphere, forming clouds; rainfall moistens the soil; the soil supports plant growth; the plants nourish the animals; and the animals, through their manure reseed and enrich the ground, making it more humid, fertile, and living.“
— Silvia Benedito
Silvia Benedito is a landscape architect, architect and educator whose design work and writings move across climate adaptation and biodiversity stewardship, atmospheric entanglement, and community-based practices. She has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in the Department of Landscape since 2011, completed her PhD at the University of Coimbra in 2024, with co-advising from ETH Zürich. This semester, she is a Guest Professor at the TUGraz, Institute of Architecture and Landscape, leading a studio exploring the concept of Habitat at the intersection of landscape, culture, and people, approaching landscape as a living system at the crossing of micro-climates and nutrient circularity; cultural practices and beauty.
Her built and research projects explore the aesthetic dimension of the atmosphere—from thermal delight to intergenerational well-being. Her books Thermodynamic Interactions (ACTAR, 2016) and Atmosphere Anatomies: On Design, Weather, and Sensation (Lars Müller, 2021) argue that atmosphere, as a physiological, material, and micro-climatic condition, is measured, described, and designed. She advocates for a greater disciplinary convergence between architecture and landscape architecture to better address the challenges of the current poly-crisis. Currently, she is working on an illustrated book for children, exploring eco-cultural practices that support nutrient circularity in rural landscapes, from the mountain to the valley, through a multi-species perspective and environmental stewardship. It is a call to reposition the rural as a territory driven by collective innovation, care, and beauty, rather than defined by absence or decline, in which design reclaims a renewed civic and ecological mission.
Through her design practice OficinaA and the NGO OficinaAcademy, she works on several landscape projects focused on climate adaptation, community co-creation, and ecological stewardship. This year, she has participated in the LILA 11 jury.
The conversation moves from atmosphere to fire, from measurement to ethnobotanical knowledge, and from the city to the rural territories, positioning landscape architecture as a discipline and practice that works for and with living things.
From the architectural object to the all-encompassing atmosphere: You combine different sets of knowledge, traversing discipline boundaries between architecture, urbanism and landscape. How did that shape your interests?
After being involved in several masterplans in Portugal, I realized I did not have sufficient tools and skills to design the public domain. My interest in public space, and in exploring its broader possibilities, lead me to pursue a Master’s in Architecture and Urban Design (MAUD) at the Harvard GSD between 2002 and 2004, where I followed the landscape architecture curricular sequence. It was an exciting time at the school, as the foundations of what would later be articulated by Charles Waldheim as Landscape Urbanism (convergence of landscape, ecology, infrastructure, and urbanism), were beginning to emerge. Among the core publications of the period were James Corner’s Recovering Landscape (1999), Stan Allen’s Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City (1999), Anita Berrizbeitia and Linda Pollak’s Inside/Outside: Between Architecture and Landscape (1999), and Praxis 4: Landscapes (2002), edited by A. Reeser Lawrence and Ashley Schafer. The results of the Downsview Park International Design Competition sparked intense discussions in the school, centered around topics such as urban ecology, process-based design, and landscape as infrastructure. The competition challenged conventional distinctions between architecture, landscape, and urbanism, positioning landscape as a dynamic framework for contemporary urbanism, rather than a subordinate discipline. At the same time, the Fresh Kills Park and High Line competitions in NYC contributed to a growing interest in post-industrial ecologies and in landscape for activating urban transformation, granting a new agency to landscape architects, including leading roles in major public commissions for the city.
After graduating, I worked at James Corner Field Operations, gradually shifting my design techniques toward landscape processes, public engagement, narrative, and the imagination. What drew me to landscape was the necessity of designing with what you cannot enclose, and is always in motion: weather, seasons, animals, the growth of plants, and entropy. By contrast, architecture often shuts out the external climate and regulates its own atmospheric conditions.
And now we return to the atmospheric… Atmosphere is both a technical domain and a space of entanglement, of sensation. It is technical because, insofar as it relates to climate, it is where thermodynamic interactions occur. I believe that as designers, we must develop expertise for more effective climatic adaptation measures, rather than outsourcing such knowledge to other disciplines. At the same time, atmosphere is also a space of aesthetic entanglement: the moment we step into a clearing after leaving the forest and feel the warmth of sunlight on our skin. This paradox contained in the term atmosphere is what makes it so fascinating to me.
Atmosphere, in your framing, is not only phenomenological. Your approach is also scientifically based.
I was interested in expanding the notion of atmosphere beyond the phenomenological domain (about which much has been written and discussed) into the physiological sphere of the body that could also be described through simulations. In a way, and perhaps related to my Mediterranean roots, I wanted to reclaim the body as a sensor that registers the microclimatic conditions through which space becomes memorable. Human comfort is somehow a rigid measure. It is true that we can only live within certain ranges of temperature and humidity, however, the definition of what constitutes comfortable environmental conditions has largely been shaped by the air-conditioning industry. Interesting is how feminist theory and post-colonial discussion are questioning the regulatory definitions of comfort. We know that women tend to feel colder due to their slower metabolic rates, and office buildings have set their internal temperatures from the perspective of men wearing suits, based on a decades-old formula that uses the metabolic rates of men.
One of the measurable conditions of the atmosphere, related to comfort, is the PET (physiological equivalent temperature) and it’s determined mainly by four environmental factors: humidity, sun radiation, mean radiant temperature, and wind. We depend on all four to feel somehow “comfortable.” That inspired what I call the 4-Colour Model: a design-based method for enhancing thermal resilience to extreme heat and cold while promoting biodiversity. In this method, I account simultaneously for the impacts of water, vegetation, soil, and sunlight, represented respectively by blue, green, brown, and pink. All of these domains, or colors, have an impact on health and well-being. For instance, a fountain cools more effectively in a hot, dry climate such as Phoenix or inland Mexico than in a hot, humid climate such as Miami. Here, the air is already saturated with moisture and can absorb less water vapor, making both evaporation and the cooling effect of sweat less effective. And the more effective measure is to promote air convection, ventilation.
We are biological sensors of environmental conditions. When wind or breezes move across the fine hairs on our skin, sensory receptors at the base of the follicles send signals to the brain, producing the sensation of cooling, the “chill” moment of winter hours. This connection between sensation and measurement is where I think there is much design work still to do. Designing for comfort necessarily implies including a wide range of thermal conditions, allowing people with different metabolic rates and vulnerabilities to choose the conditions that best suit them. For instance, children, the elderly, and pregnant women are especially vulnerable to heat. It makes sense for me to design to reduce the impacts of the extremes, and therefore widen the possibilities, creating multiple and diverse atmospheric rooms.
Some ideas we talk about here have been explored and documented in the book, Atmosphere Anatomies: On Design Weather, and Sensation. The book claims weather as a matter in design and argues for a disciplinary convergence between architecture and landscape architecture, especially considering the urgent need for climatic adaptation and biodiversity support. This work led me to investigate not only the historical material behind each project, including the design motivations of the architects and landscape architects involved, but also to document, in situ, the diverse microclimatic conditions, using my body as a sensor. Through this process, I identified design techniques linked to specific thermodynamic exchanges and effects, while developing a graphic vocabulary capable of representing them.
In a more tangible sense, it was also important to document people’s encounters with different thermal environments and how these generated well-being. Iwan Baan took on the task of documenting people’s lives in these spaces, and it was wonderful to discover so much joy, thermal delight, and awe- even during heat waves, such as the one we experienced in Paris. I remember visiting Le Jardin de Bambou in Parc de la Villette, designed by Alexandre Chemetoff, in early June, close to 33°C. Inside this small project, we experienced a temperature reduction of around 10°C, creating a true cooling refuge in the city. Families with small children had gathered there, and the sense of thermal relief was evident in their faces.
Can you say more about learning from traditional knowledge and architecture in designing (with) the atmosphere?
During the research period for Atmosphere Anatomies, I rediscovered Vitruvius and his writings on the importance of wind and good air. In Book I, when discussing the siting of cities, Vitruvius argues that unhealthy winds and stagnant air affect the health of the Polis, impacting not only the well-being of its inhabitants but also the collective life upon which civic culture and democracy democracy depend. Air was also understood as pneuma, spirit and breath. This genealogy on “good air” and city form is ancestral, and we are slowly rediscovering it.
In this research, I also found the importance of permeability. My grandmother’s house in southern Portugal was always open in the morning. That lightness and permeability between the inside and the outside, the breezes moving through the central corridor, allowed us to keep cool while outside was already heating up. There’s a kind of breathing in these southern European houses we don’t often see in Northern Europe, because of colder climates, of course, but the concept of breathable thresholds, as an architectural device, is something we are relearning.
Lina Bo Bardi was designing with the knowledge of air stratification: cool air accumulates at lower levels while warm air rises, and the exchange between them generates a continuous, gentle airflow. She rejected the use of mechanized air, arguing instead that architecture should resemble a living organism, open to and accepting nature. In SESC São Paulo, for example, she placed the children’s active play areas on the lower levels of the main gathering space under suspended volumes resembling cold grottos. On the upper levels of these suspended volumes stands the senior library for the elderly community to gather and enjoy the warmer daylight.
Le Corbusier worked with the climate engineer André Missenard in the Masterplan of Chandigarh and various of its buildings to ensure thermal comfort during the hot and dry season, as there was no budget for air conditioning. With Missenard’s guidance (who had been an early opponent of Le Corbusier’s wide windows), and inspired by a renewed sensitivity to local vernacular architecture, this constraint became an opportunity to forge a new disciplinary ethos and architectural language grounded in climate. Titled Murs Isotherms, Le Corbusier created a new spatial language: building envelopes like membranes, fins directing air movement, parasols sheltering from direct radiation, porous walls (jalis) allowing breezes to flow through, planted mounds protecting the city against sandstorms, asymmetrical tree alignments providing greater shade to south- and west-facing sidewalks, and the Sukhna Lake designed to manage rainfall and provide humidity during the dry season and foster a spiritual connection between the city and the mountains. These are just some examples.
What you are talking about is, in fact, lo-tech. However, you incorporate some high-tech tools to measure the atmosphere and design for comfort. How does scientific data translate back to the design?
Yes, I started using thermal imaging for my book Atmosphere Anatomies and for my Seminars on Climate at the Harvard GSD. Earlier, I was already engaged with climatic simulation software to test solar radiation and wind behavior in projects, as in the Europan Competition for Lisbon’s Campo Mineral, where we created a wind corridor to ventilate the city against the heat island effect. I believe in the power of these simulations and corresponding graphic results to communicate ideas, challenges or potentials. These techniques have helped me to convey objectives more easily with clients, city officials, mayors, or institutions. In my experience, speaking only about how we may feel has not been enough.
A simple example: I noticed that a few playgrounds in Cambridge (MA), where my child used to spend time playing, were very uncomfortable. By thermal imaging of one playground, I realized the ground surface was close to 50 °C, making the space thermally hostile and subjecting children to thermal stress, in other words, unsafe. I met with the Cambridge Planning Department and showed them these infrared images. The images made clear that, although the playground was LEED-certified, it did not provide the thermal protection needed for today’s extreme climate conditions, due largely to material choices: dark-toned EPDM rubber surfaces on the ground, recycled plastic benches, and unshaded south-facing concrete walls- all of which absorb and retain solar radiation.
It became clear that the regulatory framework for playground “safety” and sustainability did not include the concept of thermal safety. When I shared the thermal images, they were shocked. These made visible an invisible, but highly problematic, reality for public health. We started to generate a Manual for thermally safe Playgrounds, but unfortunately got interrupted by the Corona shutdown.
Beyond supporting public engagement and advocating for better places, simulation also allows us to test urban form. The Lisbon Campo Mineral, the Europan Competition site, was located within an overheated fabric of urban blocks. Through wind simulations, we discovered that, between the topography and the Tagus River, winds flowed down the slope in the morning (katabatic winds) and up the slope in the afternoon (anabatic winds). We then translated this finding into a design strategy by creating a ventilation corridor that became both the new avenue and the backbone of the entire urban development. We also ran solar radiation simulations so that the sequence of smaller plazas along the new avenue, for example, would allow sun in winter. There was a back-and-forth between simulation and design adjustment: we model, we shift the angles, and we model again.
More recently, for the Siemens Campus expansion, a project with Uniola GmbH and Fink+Jocher Architects in Munich, we used SimScale to show that the development could be structured along a new ventilation corridor. Conceived as a new “Central Park,” this corridor would not only manage all the rainwater on site, but also release heat potentially accumulated by the new development. At a larger scale, it would help ventilate the city.
Wind corridors in cities have become of strategic importance to exhaust accumulated heat during the night – heat stored in urban surfaces, often dark in color, and in the thermal mass that absorbs solar energy. We can model this performance in Climate Studio (Rhino plug-in) and Simscale, for instance. Thermographic images can be produced with an extra iPhone camera (FLIR) and we can simulate the PET with Honeybee or Ladybug in Rhino grasshopper. Other software possibilities are also rapidly emerging.
Why is climate not more integrated into pedagogy?
While we all recognize the urgency, perhaps we need more time to make structural changes in the curriculum. We also need more landscape architects and architects embracing thermodynamics. At the Harvard GSD, we have integrated this knowledge through an intense 2-week workshop in the core sequence of Studio and research seminars, but as the students move forward, the capacity to carry this commitment to thermodynamics also shifts to other topics. Perhaps it requires more consistency for integrating climate as a design tool. The paradox is, and if we look back at history, there are many examples of architects and designers embracing climate as matter not only in intuitive ways but also testing via models and modeling.
If we talk about your work, we cannot avoid fire. How did you cross thresholds from air to fire?
Many architects have been drawn to The Four Elements of Architecture by Gottfried Semper (the hearth as fire, the mound as earth, the roof as air, the enclosure as textile/wall), or to the landscape projects of William Kent, in which atmosphere was not only a spatial construct but also a tool for collective imagination. Following this lineage, I became increasingly interested in air and atmosphere, and in what might be reclaimed within the design disciplines: on the one hand, thermodynamic literacy for project development; on the other, the capacity to represent these phenomena in our drawings. And this inquiry resulted in the book Atmosphere Anatomies.
Back in 2017, after the Pedrógão Grande megafire in Portugal, I became interested in why wildfires were expanding across rural Europe. Coming from my design and research work on atmosphere and climate, my question then was whether the expansion of wildfires was mostly a consequence of increasing temperatures, particularly in the context of in fire-prone landscapes in South Europe. Were we seeing more frequent and intense wildfires simply because the Earth was becoming hotter and drier?
Through design research and engagement with local communities, I realized that wildfires are increasing because land practices have changed dramatically in the last century. The eco-cultural knowledge that once sustained these landscapes has gradually dissolved through mechanization, industrialization, rural exodus, chemical fertilizers, and the loss of people and domestic animals from the landscape.
The landscape became feral, unmanaged, overgrown, and increasingly vulnerable to ignitions. Echoing Stephen Pyne’s argument, wildfires are a symptom of the underlying conditions of the landscape. These are, therefore, manifestations of structural condition rooted in the abandonment of rural lands and the desertification of territories that were once maintained by communities whose agro-silvo pastoral practices have been interrupted, prohibited, forgotten, or dismissed.
… and approached from a top-down position.
Yes, fire is now an institutionalized medium, regulated by institutions and subject to permits. It has become removed from cultural practices once used to manage pastures, create landscape mosaics, reduce fuel around villages, or produce ashes from collective festivals, later used to fertilize agricultural fields.
Fire is not wildfire, as water is not flooding. Fire, or so-called cold fire or traditional fire, is also a cultural practice that brings people together, and its application in the landscape is often linked to ecological or subsistence-based purposes for nutrient circularity. Shepherds in Portugal have burned in patches for centuries. They know the ecology of the land, and understand how living things are connected. For instance, by burning in February, before spring, the shepherds enrich the thin mountain soils with mineral-rich ash, partly carried by gravity from the slopes into the valleys, while also stimulating fresh sprouts as a vital source of protein for mother goats about to give birth. These practices carry an extraordinary intelligence: they activate the local resources with purpose and in association, to what we might now call regenerative. And yet, they have been systematically suppressed, dismissed, or regulated to the point of prohibition.
In the USA and Australia, Native and Aboriginal communities, respectively, have been prohibited by federal suppression policies, rooted in colonial practices, from using fire for their eco-cultural practices. The National Park Movement in the USA, as one of the world’s first major conservation projects, and a model for similar movements elsewhere, is engrained with a history of social marginalization and exclusion. It involved the removal of Native communities who had long stewarded these lands, maintaining the nutrient cycles, open meadows, and ecological diversity through cultural burning practices that keept the web of life alive. We are now reckoning with that problematic legacy with ever-growing wildfires in these Parks.
This leads you to the rural — a territory that landscape architecture has largely left behind.
The imbalance between the amount of urban and rural projects and/or research is enormous. We became so urban. And yet the climatic and social degradation doesn’t only happen in cities. A large portion of our natural resources and living landscape happens outside the city.
This has led me to a new project I’m developing now: an illustrated book for children. It is called the Rural Novel: Stories from the Mountain to the Valley, Among Water, Plants, People and Other Creatures. The idea is to engage children in topics pertaining the rural landscapes: its ecology and nutrient cycles; to know more about food production and the support of natural resources; their communities and practices.
I want to bring back this idea of nutrient circularity from a biocultural dimension, rooted in culture and ecology. Today, I believe that to maintain the low-density territory alive, we need to encourage its inhabitation and correspondent stewardship. The various communities keep the mosaics in the landscape alive, in different plant habitats, water and humidity gradients, healthy soil. We don’t need only forests. We need grasslands also, for instance. Grasslands are among the most effective carbon-sequestering ecosystems. Through their extensive root system and fast growth, they store water, facilitate rainwater percolation into aquifers, and protect the soil against erosion. They support a wide diversity of fauna, from small mammals to pollinators. Yet their relevance is often overlooked, and further marginalized, as herbivory and pastoralism decline into residual economic and cultural practices.
As soon as rural landscapes are abandoned and human disturbance regimes cease, the heterogeneous mosaic of grasslands, agricultural fields, and woodlands gradually shifts to denser and more continuous forest cover through ecological succession. In fire-prone climates and, as paradoxical as it seems, more forests mean also more wildfires.
When I hear the word rewilding, I ask myself: rewilding without what or whom? Without people and certain animals controlling biofuel, without the herbivore’s manure returning nutrients to the land, without human presence managing the natural succession, it creates another form of abandonment. We need people, as other species, in the landscape to also activate relationships between living things.
Besides running your practice, OficinaA, with OficinaAcademy, you work to bridge these gaps between situated knowledge and care.
With OficinaA we develop honorarium-based projects via competitions or direct commissions, OficinaAcademy was formed last year as an NGO to engage in rural entrepreneurship projects with vulnerable communities, working outside the idea of a commission-driven practice. It is based on self-initiated work in conversation with multiple people and interests aiming for external funds. At its core is a belief in landscape architecture’s unique capacity to bring people together, bridge ecological and cultural domains, and foster collective stewardship.
We have started with a small project in Guinea-Bissau developed together with several rural communities and our local partner, KAFO, an NGO based in the Oio Region. The project is a Forest-School for children between the ages of 6 and 11 and creates a space where they can learn directly from community elders. Together, they explore the importance of the local forests: their ecological value, as sources of medicinal knowledge, cultural traditions, symbolic meaning, and economic livelihoods, particularly as the Sahara continues to expand southward.
The colonial legacy in the curriculum is still dominant, leaving very little to the local ecological knowledge, the cultural dimension of their region, the stories, the knowledge of elders, or the oral traditions from the different groups. The local communities, in the several iterations we had in the past years, wanted a space of learning that brings children and elders together, using nature and their community forests as a learning camp.
What I have learnt from them is extraordinary. Termite communities increase the surrounding soil fertility by hosting mycorrhizae in the depth of their nests. The soil of the nests, due to its composition mixed with termite saliva, is prized for building house foundations. It’s like concrete. The fallen branches of trees are picked up by woman to turn them into firewood or coal in support of the domestic economy. At the same time, the removals of such biomass from the forests reduces the threat of wildfires. Or the role of Parkia biglobosa (African locust bean tree) in agricultural production. As one of the few deciduous trees in the region, it belongs to the legume family (Fabaceae) and enhances soil fertility through nitrogen-fixing root symbioses and the decomposition of its nutrient-rich leaf litter. Suddenly, you are inside a large web of relationships, yeah, living things…
Landscape architecture as a discipline that connects “things,” making relationships visible, active, and beautiful. Landscapes are living entities sustained through relationships between people, water, soil, plants, animals, and the spheres, including climate. Advancing climate justice requires working directly with communities through active forms of design, care, and stewardship.
For the curriculum sequence, we have discussed five areas to explore: climate and its local challenges for food security and water access; the value of plants in the region such as grasses like Capim used for roofing and depend on cold-fire to sprout abundantly; the ecological importance of animals, including bats as bio-controllers against pests in the rice fields as warmer temperatures bring new crop-damaging threats; architectural typologies of the different ethnic groups in adaptation to rising temperatures; and food-forests with its living fences as productive thresholds that generate vegetables and medicinal plants while protecting cultivated areas from domestic animals. The new school will host this “living” curriculum, putting an emphasis on their habitat and the local eco-cultrual knowledge.
In the region of Arganil, Portugal, where wildfires are recurrent, we are now repurposing the water tanks (Lavadouros) in Cepos, once used by women, into an aquatic filtering garden and a new cooling civic Ágora. Titled Water Guardians, the project supports the local biodiversity and provides the community with a water deposit for wildfire protection. The local school will also engage with this this wet-Ágora for learning about water cycles and aquatic fauna and flora. We were delighted to be selected as one of the winners of the New European Bauhaus Prize last September in the Boost for Small Municipalities category, in recognition of our collective efforts. That was a nice surprise.
We are engaging in various rural regeneration projects, including mediating between the communities and officials. Working on projects and initiatives with vulnerable communities and territories affected by wildfires and climate extremes has reaffirmed my belief in landscape architecture as a discipline that connects “things,” making relationships visible, active, and beautiful. Landscapes are living entities sustained through relationships between people, water, soil, plants, animals, and the spheres, including climate. Advancing climate justice requires working directly with communities through active forms of design, care, and stewardship.
You’ve described wanting to make your practice a ‘salon of living things.’ Please, tell us more.
It starts with the name “oficinaa,” which in Portuguese refers to a workshop, a place where multiple tools and forms of knowledge come together. I’ve always been drawn to the idea that each project calls for its own set of tools, techniques, and modes of inquiry, each informed by a particular disciplinary ethos and constellation of relationships. For instance, we are now in a new office space, a large warehouse, charming but very cold in winter, and I wanted to treat it as thermodynamic case-study by using wool, not a residue (as this industry is in crisis) but as a resource with ecological and thermal value. Inside the warehouse, we constructed a small wooden pavilion: a cabinet of thermal comfort, a cocoon wrapped in wool sourced from local sheep that also play an important role in stewarding the surrounding grasslands. This design choice not only improves the temperature of the space but also privileges the wool sector, values the knowledge of shepherds, and recognizes the ecological role of animals in maintaining a living landscape. Increasingly, I find myself drawn to these living relationships and to the role of landscape architecture in activating them: from nutrient circularity and soil moisture retention to local economies and ecological wellbeing; from beauty and thermal experience to collective wellbeing.
We are still too much in the modern idea that things are encapsulated, objectified. It’s time to break that elementality into the set of interdependencies.
We are also currently involved in a project in Ingolstadt called Super-Blume, a ruderal garden initiative that seeks to reclaim sealed surfaces by selectively de-paving small “dots” across the city, creating micro-oases for thermal regulation, water infiltration, and pollinators support. The project emerged as a self-initiated effort after I learned that Ingolstadt has one of the highest proportions of sealed surfaces in Bavaria, a condition largely associated with Audi’s automotive industry and extensive traffic infrastructure.
For me, it was a clear example of both the role landscape architecture can play and the power of citizen mobilization. We are now implementing the first Super-Blume within a social housing complex, where it will also serve as an educational and community engagement project. Children will learn about ruderal landscapes, the water cycle, biodiversity, and the importance of urban ecology for climate adaptation. I hope that over time, many such dots might form a network of ecological and social infrastructure across Ingolstadt toward a new urban identity rooted as much in living things as in industry.
We are still too much in the modern idea that things are encapsulated, objectified. It’s time to break that elementality into the set of interdependencies. That’s not only a theoretical position.
What inspired that position? Is there a theoretical framework, a book you suggest?
Yes, in fact, I was very inspired by Paul Duvigneaud’s Ecological Synthesis (1974), which describes the landscape as a living system of energy flows and balances emerging from the interactions between the atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere. Rather than viewing these spheres as separate domains, Duvigneaud understood them in constant exchange, where any change in one sphere inevitably affects the others. He further introduced the notion of the noosphere that acknowledges the role of culture, knowledge, and human consciousness in perceiving, interpreting, and narrating these relationships. Ecology, in this sense, is not only a matter of biophysical processes, but also of cultural understanding.
Ecology is not only a matter of biophysical processes but also of cultural understanding.
The recognition of these interconnected spheres underlies the concept of thermal exchanges embodied in PET, discussed earlier. PET assesses thermal well-being through the interaction of air temperature, relative humidity, wind velocity, and mean radiant temperature. In other words, thermal well-being emerges from the exchanges between the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and lithosphere. Comfort is therefore the expression of a dynamic balance between these spheres acting simultaneously upon our bodies and skin.
When you evaluate a project, what do you look for first?
I want to see how a project activates relationships. How it sets forward a new ethos in landscape architecture: from engaging vulnerable communities to promoting nutrient circularity and material innovation; from climatic and biodiversity protection in a multi-species perspective to the creation of meaningful aesthetic experiences. Ultimately, I’m interested in how these relationships became visible and felt as a form of spatial experience, an aesthetic signature that people will remember. The “fog” made visible, as Oscar Wilde wrote.
Further Reading
Benedito, S. (2021). Atmosphere anatomies: On design, weather, and sensation. Lars Müller Publishers.
Benedito, S. (Ed.). (2016). Thermodynamic interactions: An exploration into physiological, material, and territorial atmospheres. ACTAR.
Benedito, S., Häusler, A. Landscape tunings: An urban park at the Danube.
Benedito, S. (2025). From climatic disintegration to shared reciprocities in fire-prone landscapes: Design measures for community resiliency. Journal of Landscape Architecture, 20(1–2), 124–133.
Benedito, Silvia. Canary in the Mine: Wildfires and Rural Communities in the Mediterranean Hinterland. Harvard GSD, Cambridge, USA, and Câmara Municipal de Arganil, Portugal. Available Online version: https://issuu.com/gsdharvard/docs/canary-in-the-mine
Benedito, S. (2024, May 19). Spaces of convergence. e-flux Architecture: After Comfort: A User’s Guide. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/after-comfort/601586/spaces-of-convergence
Benedito, Silvia C. “The 4-Color Model: Designing for Hotter Cities.” In STRESSTEST: Der Deutsche Pavillon / German Pavilion, 19th Venice Architecture Biennale, edited by Nicola Borgmann, Elisabeth Endres, Gabriele G. Kiefer, and Daniele Santucci. Berlin: Distanz Verlag, 2025.
Benedito, Silvia. “The Cistern-City: Designing for the new Climatic Regime in Arid(er) Latitudes,” ARQUITECTURA magazine (100 anos), Volume 388: CLIMA,
Colégio Oficial de Arquitectos de Madrid, COAM Dezembro* p. 18-27
