The territories immediately surrounding ­Vicenza – where the ­large-scale Parco della Pace is being built – were reorganized by a complex strategy of landscape transformation and land reclamation in the 16th ­century in order to improve ­agriculture. Modulated by a dense network of ­canals for draining the marshy land, rows of trees and woods ­interspersed among the pattern made by fields, this historical landscape, nowadays heavily altered, played an essential role in the ­sophisticated system of relationship that the project ­establishes with the territory and its past.

From former airport site to large-scale park

Parco della Pace, designed by a multidisciplinary team led by the Milan-based office Pa+N Associati explores the site’s past by simultaneously addressing both terrain and function. While the park’s compact general composition refers to local natural features, physical forms, traditional agricultural landscape and its structure, specific design elements evoke the site’s infrastructural history (former Dal Molin airport site).

The park’s complex program combines evocations of memory and the site’s history with a process-based design, that aims at wildlife conservation and at favoring and restoring ecological processes. Both the park’s artificial topography and the water network are designed as means to integrate measures for water resources management and storm water management within the park’s design.

Designed as the ground for a peaceful co-existence of all the different species, Parco della Pace responds to the current debate in landscape architecture that calls for parks that combine aesthetic, environmental awareness, and resiliency, to address both the needs of cities, the urban population and those of the wildlife and the environment.

Read more about Parco della Pace in Topos 100

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Denis Cosgrove, The Palladian Landscape: Geographical Change and Its Cultural Representations in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Leicester and London: Leicester University Press, 1993).

Sonja Dümpelmann and Susan Herrington, ‘Plotting Time in Landscape

Architecture’, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, 34:1 (2014): 1–14.

Sonja Dümpelmann and Charles Waldheim (eds.), Airport Landscape: Urban Ecologies in the Aerial Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2016).

John Dixon Hunt, Historic Grounds: the Role of History in Contemporary Landscape Architecture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014).

Francesca Oddo, ‘Vicenza progetta il Parcodela Pace sull’area dell’ex aeroporto Dal Molin’, Edilizia e Territorio. Quotidiano del Sole 24 Ore, 15.12.2015. http://www.ediliziaeterritorio.ilsole24ore.com/art/progettazione-e-architettura/2015-12-14/vicenza-progetta-parco-pace-area-ex-aeroporto-molin-205143.php?uuid=AC2l7NtB (accessed July 12, 2017)

Alessandra Ongaro, ‘Verso il Parco della Pace’, Officina* bimestrale on-line di Architettura e Tecnologia, 17 (2017). https://www.incipiteditore.it/prodotto/officina-17/

PAN Associati, Milano (Benedetto and Gaetano Selleri with Gwenaelle Charrier, Davide Bossi, Pietro Amato), Team leader; studio Zagari, Roma (Franco Zagari with Viola Corbari, Sarah Amari, Endri Memaj); EMF Marti Franch Arquitectura del Paisatge, Girona (Marti Franch Batllori with Miriam Garcia); ITS Engineering company, Pieve di Soligo (Giustino Moro with Andrea De Pin, Carlotta Sadoch, Carlo Titton); Studio geologico Gino Lucchetta. Consultants: Aspro Studio, Vicenza (Claudio Bertorelli, Francesco Dal Toso); Riccardo Gini; Victor Tenez; Massimo Venturi Ferriolo, Relazione illustrativa. Progetto preliminare. Parco della Pace – Stralcio opere ‘Bando Periferie”. Comune di Vicenza. Agosto 2016. http://195.31.128.25:55555/owncloud/s/w2lxq3rQO7PRhJl#pdfviewer (accessed July 11, 2017)

Laura Pilastro, Parco della Pace. C’è il progetto da 15 milioni’, Il Giornale di Vicenza 13.07.2017 http://www.ilgiornaledivicenza.it/territori/vicenza/parco-della-pace-c’-è-il-progetto-da-15-milioni-1.5829884/amp (accessed July 20, 2017)

Valentina Silvestrini, ‘Un Parco della Pace là dove c’era l’aeroporto Dal Molin”, Artribune, 27.11.2015. http://www.artribune.com/tribnews/2015/11/un-parco-della-pace-la-dove-cera-laeroporto-dal-molin-a-vicenza-al-progetto-chiude-le-aspre-polemiche-antimilitariste-ci-sara-anche-il-giardino-di-john-cage/ (accessed July 19, 2017)