Studio Associato Bernardo Secchi Paola Viganò

Architecture | Urbanism | Landscape

studio

Nowadays a park is a «social space», a place for many everyday activities, an city part that can specially contribute to give a clear structure to the whole city and metropolis.
The project for the new park in an area (about 24 ha) previously used by Belgian national rails is characterized by:
-un uninterrupted space along the previous platform ( 1,7 km) to maintain the possibility
of a connection (ecological as well as of communication) between Schelde river and the huge cultivated fringe spaces of the city.
- the concentration of planned surfaces (200.000 m2 of housing, equipments, offices and commerce) in the west part towards the big boulevards. Two principles of implantation could co-exist at the same time: the campus (free objects in a park) and the tissue (the idea of an urban continuity). Here they are proposed as provisional conditions, with possible succession and not opposed to each other. Design of open spaces was conceived as in a constant natural evolution, in harmony with the process of implementation and life thst will take place in it.
- the integration of the two existing viaducts in a new topography that had also the secondary but important purpose of promoting the clearance of coal ashes polluted land.
-a mark along the perimeter of the park that could give expression to the border as recognizable space, a threshold always identifiable by the same material.
-the multiplication of secondary routes to define an under-hierarchy network. If we observe the project from above, the park is a place where everyone is in public, a mirror of the complexity of contemporary society.