Architecture, Nature, Agricolture in the landscape of Oasis of Siwa.

Volumes have been written about the extraordinary engineering of the landscape of oases, which is the epitome of the artificial landscape, resulting from a transformation wrought by man in the sense of lowering the ground level to catch the water. This landscape illustrates the paradoxical relationship between nature and architecture in the Islamic world, where the only true form of nature is the desert, locus ferax, uninhabitable, while under the heading architecture are included the house, the town, the garden and the allotment. Examination of the geographical scale, of the image of the profound contrast between the tamed world of man and the untamed world of the desert, cannot but reveal clear-cut margins and sharp distinctions, which have given rise to the shape of the fence, the formal matrix of all Islamic architecture which determines what is inside and what outside. It is as if there were two separate entities that are counterpoised, never complementary, but can only be defined by their difference, their “otherness”: desert and non desert, limit and limitless. But on a smaller scale the oasis landscape is seen to be more complex. A garden as the town and the town as a garden , bear witness to the convergence of the formal matrices of the house with those of the garden, to the continuity of the urban fabric running into that of the allotments inside and outside the town. In some cases this is due to their common roots in real estate, to belonging to a single ground plan. The substance is different but not the grammar and syntax. For these reasons, thanks to a greater malleability of the garden substance, experimentation of the town form was made first in the garden, where the quality of the spaces and their transformability into urban parts could be verified (Petruccioli, 1994).