“The World in a Skyscraper. Space, Function and Cultures”

ABSTRACT OF THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE CONFERENCE - The city, too, is landscape. We can leave it by going into nature exchanging the urban for the rural, but we can also enter the city to live within the architecture and contemplate its forms. Every architectural structure is a landscape and promotes an educational or paedeumatic relationship between the spirit and the environment. Our gaze and our bodies activate a certain way of contemplating that promotes the interchange between the external perception of the physical world and an internal seeing, which is the psychic perception of the visual image. There is a close relationship between the aesthetic experience of the natural environment and that of the urban landscape. In the same way that humankind lives on the earth so, too, it lives in the city. The theme could be approached from various perspectives such as ‘na­ture/culture’, ‘city as human nature’, ‘ecology and the city’, symbols and metaphors, domesticated nature, nature interiorized, parks and natural en­vironments, and other related issues.