Metropolis: Piero Gilardi’s Nature Carpets Merge Art and Everyday Life

What if you could cut a square chunk out of the forest floor and bring that perfectly preserved piece of the landscape home at the end of a hike? Or re-create a sliver of a summer garden in all its beauty and diversity in a form that will never decompose or become polluted? It sounds like science fiction or a marvel of genetic engineering, but in fact, it’s a potent artistic vision that emerged in 1965 from the Turin-based studio of Italian artist Piero Gilardi (b. 1942).