Elena Stevenato is a mother, an architect, and a traveler. Once a city person, now a country person. For years, she zoomed around the world very fast as a landscape architect, designing whole cities from the ground up, catching ideas on one continent and releasing them onto another. She sped through the land and zoomed over oceans. Now, she stays in the mountains with her young family. At home during the pandemic, her children shared her design studio. As the months passed, time and space blurred. They, like many families, made more room for imagination, for endless hours of unscripted play in the gaps and blank spaces of their schedule. Invention, concentration, struggle and joy rule the day.

At the Polytechnic of Milan (Architecture and Urban Studies) and the University of Illinois at Chicago (Landscape Urbanism, MA), I considered the landscape at an urban scale. Much of my work centered on urban voids: how the landscape can “stitch” damaged or abandoned sites to the rest of the city. After five years spend designing vast cities from the ground up at SOM Chicago, I embarked upon a specialization course in Landscape Design and Horticulture at the L’Ecole Nationale Supérieure du Paysage of Versailles. My attentions essentially inverted; I pursued a line of study that augmented my expansive training with an intimate understanding of landscape at the smallest scale.

Immersion in the ground, itself, along with meticulous detailing studies and small-scale construction projects aligned my work with Land Art. As a dominant form of contemporary landscape architecture, I envision the ideas underpinning much of Land Art being played out on a grand scale, as evidenced by much of SOM’s city building projects. Above all, my time at Versailles reinforced my belief that an effective plan should be, at once, visible from above and sensible to the man on the ground.