Recovering body: resonance between Villa Ottolenghi and landscape

The elusiveness of aesthetic concepts reduces their role in contemporary landscape architecture. However, human affect cannot be reduced to instrumental rationality, and the poetic generation of space is rooted in lived, embodied experience. This paper addresses this challenge through a phenomenological approach and analysis of designer intent, using Carlo Scarpa’s Villa Ottolenghi as a case study. By analysing Scarpa’s design sketches, testimonies from collaborators, and the spatial configuration itself, the study investigates how spatial poetics are constructed through the dimensions of bodily movement, position, and perception. The paper reveals how Villa Ottolenghi creates an ‘embodied nature’ through the dynamic interplay of architecture and landscape in comparison. This approach transcends the traditional binary opposition between landscape and architecture, demonstrating that a poetic space in profound resonance with nature can be achieved through body-centred design, thereby offering a tangible path for the revival of aesthetics in contemporary landscape practice.