After Renzo Piano, Stefano Boeri will also help Genoa to regenerate itself.
The famous Italian architect has recently presented the urban project, named “The Polcevera Park and The Red Circle”, thought out as a system of parks with different ecologies and infrastructures for sustainable mobility and smart buildings for R&D and manufacturing with the aim of reversing the current image of the Polcevera valley, looking for sustainable innovation.
Firstly, The Red Steel Circle – a symbolic element and embodiment of the “urban sewing” of the two sides of the valley – will develop changing its nature: it will become a walkway, a raised square, an access and exit ramp, a corridor between the buildings or an underground path and will connect all the different territories, highlighting the great urban botanical park, the Polcevera Park.
Secondly, fundamental architectural elements will be the World Buildings, large clusters of buildings with a multi-functional role, inspired by industrial architecture and the blue colour of the Mediterranean, built with sustainable materials and provided with large roofs which will offer surfaces for the production of renewable energy; the buildings will open up to the park and will be intersected and connected by the Red Circle.
The Red Steel Circle will be first and foremost a relationship-building structure: it is a bike-pedestrian road 1570 meters long, 6 meters wide and 250 meters in diameter, equipped with a 120-meter-high Wind Tower for the production and distribution of renewable energy that connects the district just in front of the new station: the latter houses a system of wind turbines and belongs, like the Red Circle, to the new energy network of Polcevera created thanks to the contribution of the German firm Transsolar.
In addition, the Red Circle will be part of a sustainable mobility grid where bike and pedestrian paths, smart mobility lanes, shared surfaces and intelligent parking spaces all come together, with the goal of creating a safe public space on a human scale.
On the other hand, the Polcevera Park will basically consist of a system of parks that gather in the overall vision the variety of plants and trees typical of the Mediterranean basin, designed by Inside Outside | Petra Blaisse and built with the contribution of agronomist and landscape designer Laura Gatti and geologist Secondo Antonio Accotto.
In the heart of the Park stands Genova in the wood: an art installation featuring 43 trees, designed by artist Luca Vitone, dedicated to the memory of the victims, where each tree will be dedicated to a Ligurian figure from every period of the cultural scene.
In conclusion, the Parco del Polcevera will become a new centre, understood as a community of life, relationships and exchanges. Stefano Boeri says:
“The Red Circle, the Tower, the World Buildings, and the Polcevera Park with its vital chromatic and botanical variety will act as Genoa’s welcome to the passers-by of the future. A welcome to the world that crosses it and reaches Genoa from a network of infrastructure that stretches from east to west connecting Italy to Europe, parks perched on vertical walls, workers and noblewomen, singers-poets and naval engineers. A Superb City, even though it is afflicted by poignant melancholy; beautiful, even if in the harshness of its everlasting contradictions. A city of steel and sea, sculpted by wind and tragedy, but always able to stand tall.”
Images Courtesy of Stefano Boeri Architetti.
