The project links two terms: “park” and “art” in the Casanova district of Bolzano, known in Italy as one of the most advanced and significant examples of social housing in Italy. We consider the “park” as a set of questions and problems to which the project responds by constructing a space that helps people to “wake up”, common phenomena, such as the succession of the seasons, or the growth of plants and flowers so profoundly significant in relation to the real dimension of their lives.
Architects: Microscape Architecture + Urban Design
Status: Concept
Designing a park is an opportunity to correct defects, to improve a small part of the world, contributing to the ptimization of the functioning of systems or activities. In this perspective, the <art park> assumes an important function from the point of view of the urban district system, because it is an opportunity to recover broken rings, difficult connections, through the reconstruction of connections that bypass or overcome the obstacle of a terrain vague.
For us art is continuous “relational” mediation that needs a community to exist. The project is opposed to the restrictive vision that gave it post-modernity, which attributed to art and architecture a limited and exclusive intervention capacity. We think that by acting in a reversal of meaning, adherence to the construction of the project by the community of inhabitants allows us to work on aspects of everyday life, entering the creative process, as an effective opportunity for change on the ground of concrete reality, to learn to live the world better. Moreover, the tension in search of a place for the community is a response to the need to find, beyond political or social divisions, a counterpart to the rampant privatization that leads the individual to confront in a solitary way with the great themes of life .
The structuring of the space through the simple concatenation of a primary form (circle) defines an artificial puzzle of plastic elements (ring-curtain of the square and seats) and vegetation. If the <Piazza del Girotondo> defines the anchorage to the urban system producing a recognizable and playful environment in which the community self-represents (the stainless steel shapes bear the names and thoughts of the inhabitants called with a mail-art operation to intervene also in the definition of the vegetational mix of which the project gives only a possible open solution) so the natural instability and variability of the green arrangements operate on the deep perceptive plane where the consciousness of the passing of time stops being an abstract and normative concept but returns to be highlighted in its objectivity of seasonal transformations.
MICROSCAPE architecture urban design AA
Has been founded in Lucca in 2006 by two brothers: Patrizia Pisaniello & Saverio Pisaniello – deals with architectural and urban planning; architectural research and professional practice develops on levels of scalability, in the investigation of the relationship between nature and construction in the particular dimension of collective spaces. In 2010, MICROSCAPE has been selected to exhibit his work at Italian Pavilion Expo Shanghai and they won The Europe 40 Under 40. Since 2012 the graphic research of MICROSCAPE is part of NAM Nuovo Archivio Multimediale of the National Academy of San Luca, Rome. They teach at University of Florence and IED Rome.
They won these prizes: <Premio Architettura Toscana 2017> and the <CiTy_Brand&Tourism Landscape Award 2018 category CITY LANDSCAPE: Landscape redevelopment of the fringe territories sez. A>. In 2018, they have been xhibited their work to the Italian Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. Archipelago Italy.
