Dogma

Decameron

Our proposal requires rethinking the park as a sequence of ever-changing gardens. Evoking the theme of the garden does not mean going back in time but on the contrary going forward beyond the idea of ​​the park as a space for passive contemplation of nature in favour of the park as a space of diversity, sharing and solidarity among the inhabitants of the city. As with the medieval garden, the contemporary garden can be a space consisting of different ‘rooms’, in continuous transformation, where plants and mineral forms are affected by the way the citizens of Prato interpret them. In this way, artificiality is not hidden but displayed through a design that organizes the park as a sequence of elements in which ever different but clearly recognizable rhythms emerge. Proposing the interpretation of the park as garden is not a choice constrained by the fact that the area of ​​the Central Park of Prato is not large; it is also motivated by the fact that it was precisely in this part of Italy and Tuscany that an idea of ​​garden as kitchen garden emerged and that seems worth revaluating today.

The spatial organization of the park derives from the history and shape of the territory of the city of Prato. What is striking, when one observes this territory, is the clarity of its settlement, which, even in the more recent phases of urban development, seems not to have been lost and which is based on the organizational clarity of the Roman grid which stretched between Florence and Pistoia and which became the palimpsest where all the land markings were later configured: the cardo and decumanus that shaped the city, the system of parish churches that defined the Prato area in the Middle Ages and the canal system that patterned the fields and which later became the hydraulic force that powered textile factories.

From the reading of this system comes the weave that structures the park as a system of strips parallel to the orientation of the main cardo. Each of these strips refers to a specific landscape of the Prato area: the wood, the kitchen gardens and orchards, the gardens, the fields, and finally the large meadow under the walls. The park thus becomes an analogical device in which the different landscapes are evoked not only as images but above all through their use by the inhabitants. The concept of use is therefore crucial: use designates the practices engaged in by the subject, where temporality and movement cannot be reduced to a given function. Use encourages touch, close-up vision and direct contact with things. The sequence of rooms, while leaving their function vague, defines precise spatial areas, situations ever-changing, such as areas exposed to the sun and others cooler, spaces where intensity of use can vary during the day or over the seasons.