From Landscape to Surface: How Material, Colour and Craft Can Build Spatial Identity

By Dafni Tsintzeli | Wood Architecture 2026

Landscape as material information: strata, erosion, reflection, density, light and shadow. 

An editorial reflection on the Spiver × Santoni workshop, developed during Yacademy’s Wood Architecture programme. 

Colour often enters the architectural process too late. 

Once form, circulation and material systems have been defined, it is selected from a chart and applied as a final layer. This may create visual coherence, but it rarely establishes a meaningful relationship between a space and the place, culture or identity it is intended to represent. 

Perhaps the difficulty architects often have with colour begins when we treat it as a choice rather than as information. 

A landscape does not simply offer a palette of beige, white, blue or brown. It contains gradients, geological layers, erosion, density, reflection, ageing, roughness and imperfection. Its colour changes with material, distance, weather and light. The designer’s task is therefore not to reproduce its appearance literally, but to observe these qualities and determine how they might be translated into material and space. 

This question became central during an intensive workshop hosted by Spiver in Sicily as part of YACademy’s Wood Architecture programme. Guided by Giorgio Donà and Cansu Usta of Stefano Boeri Interiors, six students were asked to develop a showroom concept for Santoni using Spiver’s materials, colours and surface technologies. The workshop brought landscape, culture, craft, colour and material innovation into the same design process, allowing us to examine a broader architectural question: how can a surface carry the identity of a place?

Colour as a Process of Making 

Santoni’s hand-colouring process reveals colour as an accumulation of gestures rather than a uniform final coating. 

Santoni provided a particularly relevant starting point. The company’s identity is grounded in Italian shoemaking, material knowledge and craftsmanship. In its products, colour is not always understood as a uniform coating added to a completed object. It can emerge gradually through the hand-colouring of leather, as pigments are applied, absorbed and layered to produce tonal depth and individual variation. 

Colour, in this context, is inseparable from making. It records time, gesture and transformation.

This offers architecture a useful parallel. Instead of asking which colour represents a landscape or a brand, we might ask how colour is produced within it. How does it accumulate? How does it respond to light? Where does it become more intense, weathered, reflective or opaque? 

Observing Sicily made this distinction tangible. The landscape offered not a fixed palette but a field of material relationships: pale geological strata cut by shadow, rough surfaces beside reflective water, gradual transitions between earth and stone, and forms shaped through erosion and time. Translating these qualities required abstraction rather than imitation. 

A photograph of the landscape could easily become a moodboard. The architectural challenge was to prevent the process from ending there. 

From Landscape to Material 

LANDSCAPE → CULTURE → CRAFT → COLOUR 

MATERIAL → SURFACE → SPACE → IDENTITY 

Each stage involved interpretation. Landscape acquires meaning through culture; cultural knowledge is sustained through craft; craft transforms colour and matter; material becomes surface; and surface begins to organise spatial experience. Identity is not placed at the end as a graphic signature. It emerges from the continuity of the entire process. 

Calce & Clay SCULTURA: relief transforms a pale surface into an active field of depth, texture and shadow. 

Spiver’s Calce & Clay SCULTURA became relevant within this sequence not simply as a product, but as a tool of translation. Made from clay, lime and calcarenite, it can be moulded into substantial relief, allowing a wall to carry depth, texture and shadow rather than functioning as a flat chromatic background. Its final character depends on both material properties and the decisions of the person applying it. 

This expands the architectural role of the finish. Colour is no longer separated from form: it is affected by ridges, recesses, density and light. A single tone can produce multiple readings because the surface itself changes how it is perceived.

From Surface to Space 

For our showroom proposal, developed with Christian Benoit, this capacity suggested a continuous sculpted terrain. The surface was conceived not as a decorative backdrop to the shoe, but as a spatial ground that could display products, guide movement and create transitions between open discovery and more intimate consultation. 

Its layered expression drew on the logic of sediment and rammed earth without reproducing either literally. Horizontal strata, tonal transitions and changes in relief translated observations of landscape into a material system. The landscape therefore entered the project not as an image, but as an organising principle. 

Experimentation as Continuity 

Craft identity is sustained across generations through knowledge, judgement and continued transformation. 

Craftsmanship and experimentation are often presented as opposites: one preserves knowledge while the other disrupts it. Yet established crafts, materials and brands remain relevant precisely because they continue to evolve. 

Innovation does not necessarily mean abandoning tradition. It can mean giving tradition new tools through which to remain alive. 

This relationship connects Santoni’s approach to colour with Spiver’s approach to architectural finishes. In both cases, experimentation extends material knowledge rather than replacing it. The quality of the result continues to depend on judgement, repetition, precision and the intelligence of the hand. 

The same principle applies to spatial identity. A brand does not evolve by discarding everything that makes it recognisable, nor by reproducing the same interior indefinitely. It evolves by translating its underlying values into new contexts. Our proposal consequently imagined a consistent spatial system whose colour, texture and intensity could adapt to different locations. 

Seen this way, the surface becomes a mediator: between landscape and interior, culture and contemporary production, technical formulation and human craft. But a surface alone cannot create architecture. The concept must be strong enough to absorb these references and organise space through them. 

Only then can landscape move beyond the moodboard - from information to material, from material to surface, and from surface to an identity that can be experienced.