Garden in Progress

Simona Ferrari (b. 1988, IT) is an architect working across different scales and formats. Through building, photography, drawing, and writing, her practice engages with architecture and its broader environment, both physical and theoretical. In my projects, I am interested in imagining and examining architecture in relation to its surroundings—the landscape and the city and their histories—as well as to its visual embodiments—drawings and photographs—exploring how the latter mediates our understanding and experience of space and, as material artifacts, can construct environments. Simona studied architecture at the Polytechnic University of Milan (B.Sc. with Honors, 2010) and the Technical University of Vienna and received her Master’s degree from the International Graduate Program in Architecture and Urban Design at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (M.Eng.,2014, Monbukagakusho Fellowship). She completed a Master in Fine Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts (MFA, 2022). She has worked internationally with the Tokyo-based studio Atelier Bow-Wow, where she led several projects from concept to completion including the Search Library in Muharraq, Bahrain, installations and exhibition designs at various venues and institutions such as the Cultural Center of Chicago, Harvard GSD, La Biennale di Venezia, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the MAXXI Museum in Rome, and the Triennale di Milano. Alongside her practice, between 2017–2023 Simona has been teaching and researching at the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich, Chair of Architectural Behaviorology (Prof. Momoyo Kaijima), where she taught design studios and co-authored the book ‘Swiss Window Journeys’ (gta Verlag, 2023). She was assistant curator of the Japan Pavilion at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale (2018).Her work has been awarded by international competitions such as Europan and has received grants from the Austrian Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology of Japan (MEXT), the European Union, and the City of Zurich. Recently, she was architect-in-residence at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles with the MAK Schindler Scholarship and at the Charles Moore Foundation in Santa Monica. She currently lives and works in Zurich. Here is an archive of her works. You can get in touch with her by Email & Instagram

Simona Ferrari is an architect working across different scales and formats, engaging with both commissioned and self-initiated projects, as well as collaborations. Her practice encompasses building, photography, drawing, and writing, exploring the relationship between architecture and its broader context, both physical and theoretical. In my projects, I am interested in examining and imagining architecture in relation to its surroundings—the landscape, the city, and their histories. I also consider its visual representations, such as as drawings and photographs, and how these mediums shape our understanding and experience of space, ultimately serving as material artifacts that construct environments. Here is an archive of her works. You can get in touch with her by Email & Instagram

Garden in Progress / Landscape In-Between: A River and a Backyard / Inhabiting Pictures: On Luisa Lambri’s Artistic Practice / Making Mountains / The Annals of My Glass House / Shop Sign / On Exposed Film and Embodied Spaces / Tower of Azuma / Domestic Forms / Rooms and Hedges

“Alas, the lovely garden, placed high above the coast / Is built on crumbling rock. Landslides / Drags parts of it into the dephts without warning” —Bertolt Brecht from “Garden in Progress”

Living in exile in Los Angeles in the 1940s, Bertolt Brecht maps his new physical surroundings as well as his emigrant experience through his poetry. Using Brecht’s garden poems as an entry point to the city, Garden in Progress is the culmination of a body of research developed during the MAK Center residency program that presents gardens as a lens for navigating Los Angeles. Defined by the boundaries regulating property ownership, gardens are deeply enmeshed in the extractive process of land subdivision on which modern urban planning practices rely. Yet, they also rebel against those established principles. As places in constant transformation that rely on caretaking and constant upkeep, gardens offer alternative ways of space-making. Across the various ethnic communities of Los Angeles, the garden has historically served—and continues to serve—as a social space, a place of labor, a means to counter discriminatory urban policies, to reclaim access to space and resources, emerging as an urban common of the city. By examining the space of the garden as a structuring element embedded in the entire social fabric and diffuse urban texture of Los Angeles, the project aims to outline an inclusive interpretation of LA’ urban landscape.

For the final exhibition at the MAK Center I turned my fieldwork encounters into large 1:1 scale hand drawings. By placing the drawings across the site of Schindler’s Mackey Apartments, the installation translates my journey across Los Angeles into a progression through the exhibition. With their environmental scale, the drawings also functioning as site-specific interventions. The drawings use a line-drawing technique typical of architectural plans, creating a ghostly effect at 1:1 scale. This invites visitors to engage closely, encouraging a physical experience of the sites rather than just a visual one. Beyond the exhibition, the project included collaborations with LA-based artists and poets David Horvitz, Sophia Le Fraga, Joseph Mosconi, Corina Copp, Cleo Abramian, and Benno Herz. It also concluded with a final drawing survey, created during a residency at the Charles Moore Foundation in Santa Monica.

Location: MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, US

Year: 2023-2024