Geography/ History/Territory/Site/Object: Vittorio Gregotti’s ‘Total Environment’ as Architectural Praxis.

Vittorio Gregotti writes in Il territorio dell’architettura (1966, p. 87): “When one looks from a great distance, in an aerial view of things (...), they lose their recognizability, yet they increase our ability to understand their structures; things are reduced to points, to fragments; the collection of these points and fragments forms the pattern of the distribution on the ground, the modes and directions in which it has been established; the lines of margins, tangents, conflicts, the whole and residual parts, the clash between geometry and geography.”
In this brief sentence, we can easily identify what might be called a method, a hypothesis of vision or, as Gregotti himself puts it (1966, p. 87): “an optics, and therefore a combinatorial approach to the materials surveyed, considered as concrete form, and worked by juxtaposition.”
Gregotti here offers us a key to overcome the approach in which the figure (geometry) is simply laid upon a background (geography). He provides us with the means to perceive a continuity between the built and the natural environment, which becomes clear depending on the scale (distance) at which we critically read the phenomenon.
It is, therefore, the physical way in which things exist: the modes by which the built object gives measure to the natural landscape and, conversely, the way in which the landscape offers the object the opportunity to define itself through the difference of its constitutive essence, actualized within it.