Home Cities Mobility Projects Sustainability Digitisation MAP
Topos
Follow us

Premium Top

Billboard Top

To top

From September 5 to 22, and for the ninth consecutive year, Bergamo will be at the center of the landscape culture. The event I Maestri Del Paesaggio – Masters of Landscape, organised by the Arketipos Association and the Municipality of Bergamo, promotes nature and beauty through a calendar dedicated to landscape architecture and outdoor design.

[tttgallery id=”708″]

The theme of the 2019 Edition is Pioneer Landscape, the celebration of pioneer and spontaneous vegetation that investigates the relationship between architecture and nature, inviting the user to perceive plants as living and moving entities.

The highlights of the 18-day program – filled with seminars, workshops, exhibitions, competitions, and shows – are the Green Square, an extraordinary reinterpretation of Piazza Vecchia in Bergamo, the Green Design, a project dedicated to enhancing public spaces and their green reinterpretation; and the International Meeting of the Landscape and Garden – culmination of the event, attended each year by the most important landscapers in the world.

The author of the Green Square project, inspired by the theme Pioneer, is Luciano Giubbilei, Anglo-Italian landscape architect, three-time winner of the Best in Show award at the Chelsea Flower Show, and known throughout the world for the discrete elegance and serenity of his gardens.

[tttgallery id=”709″]

The International Meeting of the Landscape and Garden now in its ninth edition, is open to experts and amateurs. This year too, it follows the general theme of the Festival, Pioneer Landscape. The protagonists speak of their design philosophy through a renewed formula that alternates lectures, talks and videofilms.

The following persons will give lectures:

For more information about the whole event click here.

For the eighth time, the Arketips Association and the district council of the north Italian City of Bergamo organized the international event i maestri del paesaggio – Masters of Landscape. This year’s event dealt with the very basis of each and every landscape: plants. The traditional highlight and closing act was the two-day International Meeting on September 21st and 22nd at the Teatro Sociale which featured talks of renowned landscape designers.

The combination of rural and urban, of built stone and plants could not have worked better than it did at this year’s i maestri del paesaggio: there were two dominating locations – content-focused talks at the historic Teatro Sociale took turns with breaks at the green Piazza Vecchia.

[tttgallery id=”533″ template=”content-slider”]

The green metamorphosis of this plaza – an example of urban building culture that has grown over centuries – was the heart and soul of this year’s event with the main theme “Plant Landscape”. It is only logical that Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf was asked to design this temporary art intervention. Before starting to work on the project, the designer had doubts though: “Normally, a garden grows over time. This time, everything had to be ready at the start of the event.” Oudolf made a plan of the Piazza, dedicated space to the cafés and incorporated the fountain in the middle of the plaza. Despite all the planning, a lot of improvisation went into the design, he says. That is the great artistry of the designer that is part of the New Perennial movement: he designs in advance, plans beforehand which plants are suitable and where to crop them, he maps out, conceptualizes – and in the end it all seems perfectly natural, impulsive and vital. This organic structure is achieved by the way he arranges the plants – mostly shrubs and weeds – in so-called “drifts”. For his design, colors are important – but not as much as structure: this is where Oudolf puts his special attention.

Perception of Landscape Design

From this seemingly wild landscape in which visitors met for relaxed conversations and found recreation admidst the atmosphere of Italian building culture, it was just a short way to the content work at the Teatro Sociale, an impressive building with wooden balustrades and ceiling joists: in a panel talk, Dutch landscape artist Piet Oudolf, American garden architect and author Thomas Rainer as well as Nigel Dunnett, professor for plant design and urban horticulture at Sheffield University, discussed their perception of landcape design. Dunnett is a pioneer in the field of new ecological approaches in urban gardening and public spaces. The focus of Nigel Dunnett’s work is the integration of ecology and horticulture to achieve a dynamic and diverse landscape that matches nature with minimal effort. Despite the absence of a heated discussion or an actual counterposition, these three famous discussants laid a substantive basis.

[tttgallery id=”534″ template=”content-slider”]

From specific Garden Design to global Climate Adaptions

While French gardening superstar Louis Benech – the first one to be allowed to redesign a piece of famous Versailles – and Italian landscape architect Filippo Pizzoni talked about their work ethic and projects of the past, Kristina Knauf – urban planner at MVRDV – and Sandra Piesik – British architect – focused on a broader, green urban development in times of climate change. The men dealt with their specific examples while the women kept an eye on the big picture.
Kristina Knauf presented different urban projects of her renowned Dutch architecture firm. For her as leader of various projects, it is an important aspect to incorporate a lot of green in her designs. “It is of the utmost importance to cater to the climate adaption,” says Knauf. Her current project is to transform downtown Eindhoven into a green link between three park-like areas. For this, building walls and roofs will be turned into green spaces. “It’s supposed to look like we turned the city upside down and dipped it in paint.” The most important part though is to create productive green, to think about where it makes most sense. The firm acts as a consultant body for town councils, engages in dialogue with them and argues in favor of the incorporation of sufficient green areas that are financially profitable for them as well.

[tttgallery id=”535″]

Architect Sandra Piesik presented her book HABITAT: Vernacular Architecture for a Changing Planet, a big publication that brings together a team of more than a hundred leading experts from various fields to study vernacular architecture in the context of climes, ecosystems, sustainable resources and urban development.
Piesik examines ways, people have found to use architecture to create conditions worth living in. Traditional or autochthonous architecture that had been in existence all over the world up until our century is shaped by the locally available building materials. The revival of these traditions could generate some thought-provoking impulse today.

Symbiosis of Architecture and Landscape

An example for a working symbiosis of architecture and landscape is the project design “San Pellegrino Flagship Factory” by Danish firm BIG – introduced by Giulio Rigoni. The industrial park in San Pellegrino Terme, located there since 1899, is surrounded by picturesque nature, rivers and mountains. It is evident that architects have to respect the social and cultural context of cities and landscapes when realizing projects. Of course, new perspectives may flow in but cannot obscure the place and its appearance. Bjarke Ingels Group promises to keep this in mind with their design for the new Flagship Factory San Pellegrino: it does not superpose the factory with extraneous elements but combines the modular architecture of the factory with repetitive elements of Italian classicism and rationalism. Space varies with smaller and larger span lengths of the arcs and makes the architecture move and flow in the same way the local river does. Everything seems to have a flowing structure.

Bergamo – contact point for landscape architecture

While Milan is famous for fashion and Venice for art and architecture, Bergamo devotes itself to landscape architecture and gardening design. The event promotes the interdisciplinary exchange between all fields that deal with any form of landscape with the interrelationship of architecture and landscape as well as the role of plants in the context of urban growth, densification, and climate change.

Every year in September a Summer School for students from all over the world is accompanying the “I Maestri del Paessagio” event in Bergamo.

[tttgallery template=”content-slider”]

Master Plan for Parco Ovest

This year the task of the summer school was to design the 12.5 hectares large area of the Parco Ovest in Bergamo. Referred to the design guidelines of the project one important aim of the park is “to realize an important and useful initiative for the overall growth of the landscape culture in Bergamo and Italy.” The newly planned park should be “a good mix” of both a public park implemented into a “peripheral urban context” and an agronomic park including “experimental university research” as well as components attracting visitors and tourists.

The main topic of the nine days workshop from 13th to 21st of September was to develop a master plan based on a strong conceptual approach. On this basis three different projects have been worked out.

The summer school 2017 has deliberately created three very different concepts for the new Parco Ovest in Bergamo. Following a leading idea, each of them shows the potentials of the place. Therefore, the workshop and its results can be seen as a successful starting point of an ongoing process. Now, a further analysis of the project area is needed as well as a deeper design research. The three concepts are representing a promising base for the next steps:

Soundscape

The general design approach of the project considers the existing potentials like topography, vistas to Bergamo Alta or water bodies as well as existing challenges like the presence of important infrastructure elements such as the highway in the south, the railway in the west and the airport ‘Orio al Serio’ in the southeast. Based on an analysis of Bergamo’s wider green structure, the concept proposes to connect the park with the surroundings, respectively with the ecological corridor and agricultural park in the west of the railway embankment.

Within this green system, the outstanding characteristic of the new park is its function as a soundscape. The designers propose to shape the noise protection embankments along the highway and along the railway as sound waves. In this southern part of the park, additional noise of the aeroplanes has a high impact. By contrast, the concept suggests for the northern part of the park to make the sound of trees – for instance caused by inner tensions – audible for users and visitors.

Team Soundscape: Stephen Flack (Australia), Gloria Gusmaroli (Italy), Viviana Lavermicocca (Italy), Farzana Sharmin (Bangladesh), Maria Sokolova (Russia), Andrea Volpato (Italy)

Parco Sottosopra

The main design inspiration for the ‘Parco Sottosopra’ is the (partly existing) topography. Between the five entrances/accesses to the park area – two from the urban quarter in the north, one from the east, another one from the west through a new passage under the railway and the fifth from the southeast- the designers fold up a system of gently inclined and steeper slopes and structure the site with longer and shorter axes. Hence, they are creating a variety of interesting Ups and Downs, elevated view points and depressed wetlands and ponds. Cutting the earth bodies of the terrain the axes define a hierarchy of different pathways for variable speeds: from the faster bicycle route down to narrow wooden walkways across the wetlands.

Team Parco Sottosopra: Mohammad Al Najdawi (Jordan), Loredana Florentina Cirdei (Romania), Claudia Ferrari (Italy), Nino Gavascheli (Georgia), Ksenia Tkacheva (Russia), Elene Tsutskiridze (Georgia), Sander Van de Putte (Belgium)

Loop Land Scape

Based on a zoning concept respectively on a bubble diagram showing the potentials for future uses in the new park, the designers develop a system of interlocking elliptic spaces on different terrain levels. In spite of their formal similarity, each ‘loop’ has a different size and its own character.

Team Loop Land Scape: Niels De Couvreur (Belgium), Irina Mayorova (Russia), Reem Hamdan (Jordan), Davide Manica (Italy), Giya Elizabeth George (India), Chiara Gregori (Italy), Marta Rodeschini (Italy)

 

The design results have been developed under the supervision and guidance of Prof. Ingrid Schegk, Landscape Architect, Weihenstephan University of Applied Sciences, Prof. Arch. Fulvio Adobati, Università di Bergamo and PhD. Arch. Elisabetta Bianchessi, Bergamo Landscape and Garden Institute

 

Maurizio Vegini wants to make Bergamo both a centre of the landscape and of landscape architecture. With this goal in mind, and with a lot of idealism, the Italian landscape architect, who both lives and works in Bergamo, launched the roughly three-week long event I Meastri del Paesaggio in 2011. This September he and the Lombardy Region successfully enticed numerous tourists and professionals to visit the northern Italian city for the seventh time. This is good for Bergamo’s sense of pride, as much of the time it remains in the shadow of the design metropolis Milan, which is only 50 km away. This situation is unjust, however, and not only because of this event, which lends the city a very lively and yet relaxed atmosphere for couple of weeks. With its surrounding countryside and the two very different parts of the city Città Alta and Città Bassa (the upper and lower city), Bergamo is the right setting to provide landscape architecture with the attention it deserves, but which it has not yet been given in Italy. This is the case even after the numerous landslides and floods the country has experienced in recent years.

[tttgallery template=”content-slider”]

Motto 2017: Cool Landscapes

“Cool Landscapes” was therefore a suitably chosen theme for I Maestri del Paessagio 2017. The idea was conceived by the Dutch landscape architect Lodewijk Baljon, who was entrusted with the temporary redesign of the Piazza Vecchi in the historic upper city by Vegini and his team from Arketipos (an association specially created to organise the event). With approximately 60 weather balloons hovering over the plaza and huge block of ice, which melted faster than the event lasted, Baljon wanted to highlight, among other things, climate change and the global warming associated with it. But his design of the plaza also did justice to the second meaning of “cool” (in the sense of fashion, appearance, attitude and style): For the duration of the temporary redesign the Piazza Vecchia was transformed into an incredibly attractive and relaxed place that was used during the day as well as in the evening by both young and old.

A meeting of masters

And yet I Meastri del Paesaggio also had more on offer: Numerous workshops, discussions about the landscape and exhibitions spread over the 18 days of the event and throughout the entire city, as well as a summer school and, as a fitting culmination, a 1-1/2 day-long international meeting at which numerous masters of landscape architecture came together, including Baljon, Thorbjörn Andersson from Sweden, Walter Hood from the USA, Perry Lethlean from Australia, Michel Pena from France and Filippo Piva from Italy. They talked professionally and entertainingly about both old and new projects and provided the nearly 300 listeners with a great deal of inspiration in the impressive setting of the former convent Sant Agostina, which has been converted into a university.

For three weeks a year Vegini is very successful in making Bergamo a centre of relevant landscape-related topics. With the support of the Lombardy Region and the goal of establishing a masters program in landscape architecture in Bergamo, this will hopefully be the case in the future as well.

 

 

 

From 7th to 24th September, and for the seventh consecutive year, Bergamo will be at the center of the landscape culture. The Piazza Vecchia in the Citta Alta gets the stylistic touch of the landscape architect, Lodewijk Baljon, who conceives it and is consistent with the focus of the International Meeting (22th to 23th September). 

[ttt-gallery-image]

At the meeting, amateurs and specialists alike can come in contact with the culture of the landscape through the explanation of speakers of national and international renown. Among this year`s  speakers are Thorbjörn Andersson from Sweden, Walter Hood from the USA and Perry Lethlean from Australia, just to name a few (Download programme)

Lodewijk Baljon designs Green Square

The Dutch landscape architect, Lodewijk Baljon, will be the designer of this year`s Green Square (and also speaker at the meeting). The temporary installation that in Baljon’s own words “could develop the theme of coolness in literal terms – a cool temperature and shadows – or reflecting the style and attitude of “cool”, indicating ease and elegance. The Green Square in fact –  looking more as a site-specific installation than a makeover imitating natural landscape – will use tangible and symbolic elements to inspire a reflection on the global warming.

Besides the temporary installation at Plaza Vecchia and the International Meeting, the event is also accompanied by many workshops, exhibitions, guided tours throughout the city.

For more information and application go to:

www.imaestridelpaesaggio.it/2017