“Lorenzo Rota” New Botanical Garden

The design provides a landscape redevelopment and a new lighting system for Bergamo’s botanical garden. The idea arises from the suggestions the site conveys and from the potentialities of the place, aiming at building a knowledge route through which not only visiting the botanical garden, but also to reflect on the complex relationship between city and landscape. This aim stems from the willingness to make the morphology of the area – characterized by strong gradients – turn into a resource, such as to give the site new potentialities. Faced with this garden built on several levels, the imagination thus runs to the idea of knowledge as an ascent from a lower condition to a higher condition, through a step-by-step journey leading from the bottom to the top, where the effort of the ascent symbolically corresponds to the commitment that learning requires. Here, then, the suggestion of a botanical garden as an ascending itinerary to be built around the backbone of the existing walkway, and capable of systemizing the different architectural episodes and thematic areas that unravel along its development. The square, located physically and symbolically at the peak of the cognitive path, is configured as a privileged observatory on the landscape, becoming the culmination of a progressive environmental awareness pathway.