The Ocean as Ground reframes centuries of maritime infrastructure, forgotten offshore projects, and commercial sea routes as evidence that the ocean has long functioned as an urbanised space — and asks what that means for how we design on land.
About This Book
The prevailing image of the ocean as empty, uninhabited space has always been a fiction. Matteo Vianello's The Ocean as Ground dismantles that fiction by recovering the histories, projects, and spatial logics that have made the sea a site of architecture, ecology, infrastructure, and politics for centuries. Working through the conceptual lens of "ground", Vianello inverts the conventional relationship between land and sea: rather than understanding the ocean from the shore, he proposes that land urbanisation itself can only be fully understood by starting from the water. In an era of planetary urbanisation, this is a necessary corrective to a discipline that has long looked the wrong way.
Key Features
- 160 pages of theoretical and historical analysis spanning architecture, ecology, infrastructure, and maritime politics
- Written by Matteo Vianello
- Published by JOVIS Verlag
What You'll Discover
- How centuries of commercial trade and subsea infrastructure have constituted the ocean as an urbanised environment long before the term was applied to it
- The untold history of architecture's relationship with the sea, including forgotten projects and offshore modernism
- How the concept of "ground" can be extended beyond land to reframe spatial perception, design practice, and inhabitation across both land and sea
- A framework for rethinking planetary urbanisation that begins at the water's edge rather than the city centre
About the Author
Matteo Vianello is the author of this study. [Details available upon request]
Specifications
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 160
- Dimensions: 150 × 220 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783986122652
- Publisher: JOVIS Verlag
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects, urban theorists, and researchers working at the intersection of maritime geography, infrastructure, and planetary urbanisation — and anyone interrogating where the city ends and nature begins.