Deep can be framed as a counter-concept to the modern illusion of the limitless (Scaffai 2025). The surface, as a space of limitless expansion, can no longer conceal the stratification of ecological, social, and material crises, thus revealing itself as an exhausted dimension, whereas a new potential emerges in stratified and reactive depth. In the 21st century, depth thus replaces the limitless ambition: where once there was expansion, now there is thickness, pressure, and resistance. Depth becomes a place of memory, of planning tension, and of reconfiguring our relationship with the planet through perspectives similar to those of deep ecology (Næss 1992), attempting to grasp the limits of the anthropocentric attitude (Scaffai 2025).
In landscape design culture, thematic explorations related to depth have long emerged, explored with a rather variable repertoire of theoretical and graphic approaches. The first and most immediate clue to depth appears naturally in geological stratifications (as in Humboldt’s representations) or in temporal, historical, or archaeological overlays (Cambi 2003, Manacorda 2007). Rachel Carson wrote about deep-sea sediments in 1951: “The sediments are a sort of epic poem of the earth. When we are wise enough, perhaps we can read in them all of past history. For all is written here”. (Carson, 1951, 72). Metaphorically, we then speak of narrative stratifications, meaning, and memory(ies) (Conan 1999, Romani 2008, Matteini 2025), in many cases adopting layering as a practice of interpretive reading and design ethics (Caravaggi 2016).
In this sense, it is crucial to mention both concepts of paysage millefeuille and poetic archaeology defined by Bernard Lassus (1998), categories combining the tools of science and poetry to investigate the DNA of a site, that spirit of the place for which “Places can be, we might say, ‘inhabited’ in a profound way” (Dixon Hunt 2022). In his famous well experiment proposed in 1972, Lassus highlights how profundity (spatial, historical, conceptual, or symbolic) facilitates access to that “door of the poetic imagination” definable as “demisurable,” which undoubtedly consti-tutes an essential dimension for landscape design (Lassus 1990, 1998, Venturi Ferriolo 2006). The theme of depth and excavation/exploration, with its inevitable metaphor of psychoanalytical significance (Pontalis 1982) can also emerge in hidden, removed, and lost landscapes that are covered or erased with other landscaping, sometimes functional to the removal itself (Dixon Hunt 2001, Pirazzoli 2016).
Having lost the illusion of limitless, our century must learn to recover the ideas of depth, in-finity, thickness, and the mutual interference of layers: landscape design thus becomes a practice of negotiation with (and in) depth. Truth is no longer visible from above, from a privileged vantage point: it is produced and revealed in the conflictual relationship between consumption and regeneration, between surface and thickness. In this sense, the underground can be read as a portrait of human choices, reflecting the society that shapes it. It is a social, political, and cultural archive. For this reason, depth is not just a geological fact, but an epistemic device: it is the place where the planet “speaks to us,” materializing the choices we have made.
Contributions reflecting on these issues and focusing on diverse aspects of landscape architecture culture, theory and practice are encouraged, particularly those that are thought-provoking and capable of challenging established interpretative frameworks.
Keywords: Layering; Poetic archaeology; Underground; Deep ecology; Landscape design and plan-ning; Design in section; Depth.
The call is open until May 31st 2026.
To submit your full paper, please go to our submission platform: https://oaj.fupress.net/index.php/ri-vista/about/submissions
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The proposals have to be unpublished and written in Italian or English; the text can be of 20,000 to 30,000 characters, including spaces, title, authors, abstract, keywords, captions and references.
The proposals have to include a minimum of 5 — a maximum of 10 pictures with good definition (at least 300 dpi/inch and 25 cm the smallest side) free from publishing obligations or accompanied with the specific permission.
The selected papers will be published in the thematic section of the 1 | 2026 issue of Ri-Vista.
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