February 25, 2004

A prestigious international competition for a new urban park in the centre of Milan held by the City Council has been won by 48 year old Dutch landscape and interior designer Petra Blaisse’s Amsterdam-based practice Inside Out. The design was chosen by a panel including Stefano Boeri, professor of urban planning at the University of Venice and editor of Domus, from an impressive list of ten international finalists: Martha Schwartz, Peter Walker (both USA), West 8/Adriaan Geuze, Kathryn Gustafson (England), Giancarlo di Carlo, Andrea Branzi and Marco Bay (Italy) and Michio Sugawara (Japan).

The site of the Giardini di Porto Nuova, located between the central and Porto Garibaldi railway stations is dubbed ‘the garden of the new door’ by the competition board as Porto Garibaldi is a key city rail terminal and junction between business and cultural buildings and residential areas to the north. Ms Blaisse says that the future park will be the ‘beating heart’ of the district, with its high junction of public and private functions’, and will serve as a new community meeting point and cultural campus for festivals and fashion shows.

The winning concept renames the park Biblioteca degli Alberi (‘Library of Trees’). A rich and varied mix of botanical gardens, orchards, six public squares, pavilions for events, circular groups of trees, and areas of water will be interlaced with paths, six 14 foot wide and seventeen 7 foot wide that function as infrastructure. These unify the park and connect it to the surrounding residential, office and retail buildings. Each path is to be made of a different material including asphalt, black concrete and wood, with information about the park, shrubs and local amenities printed on some of the surfaces

The competition team included Michael Maltzan (architect, Los Angeles) and the Dutch graphic designer Irma Boom. Ms Blaisse was born in London, England, in 1955, and grew up in England, Portugal, Austria, Sweden and the Netherlands. She opened her own design office, Inside Outside, in Amsterdam 1991, and has been responsible for the landscaping of many buildings by Rem Koolhaas, including the Seattle Public Library and the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago, and the Casa da Musica in Porto.

Lucy Bullivant

ADVERTISEMENT