The work of Italian garden designer Pietro Porcinai

Abstract

Pietro Porcinai (1910 - 1986) was the Italy‘s most distinguished garden designer of the twentieth century. He was born in Settignano (Florence) and grew up in the ambience of Villa Gamberaia, where his father was a head gardener. He gained a diploma in agriculture in 1928 and left to the nothern Europe. He stopped in Germany where he worked a few years. In Belgium he met the new tendention of the „constructed garden“ and in Germany was influenced by Fritz Enchke and Karl Foerster. He started to practise in 1931. Pietro Porcinai was one of the founders of IFLA (International Federation of Landscape Architects) in 1948 and two years later he founded with Raffaele Vico and Michele Bussini the Italian Association of Landscape Architects (now AIAPP). Porcinai saw his method as the creation of garden spaces with plants, rather than architecture. There is 1,318 projects in his archive - private gardens, public parks, motorways, urban spaces, which reveal that his deep understanding of modern design was never surrended. In 1957 Porcinai bought Villa Rondinelli on a Fiesole hillside where he worked and lived until his death in 1986.

Keywords

• modern garden design
• Pietro Porcinai
• Italy
• IFLA