Openfabric

WE ARE Openfabric is a young Landscape Architecture and Urban Design practice based in Rotterdam (the Netherlands), founded in 2011 by Francesco Garofalo. It is currently engaging in various countries such as Netherlands, Albania, Italy, China, Colombia and Peru. Responding to the large variety of possibilities that the intersection of city, society and nature creates, […]

The jury was particularly drawn to the project’s ability to treat historical form with seriousness and humour simultaneously. Rather than merely restoring a historic composition, the design speculates on the sense of wonder and estrangement such landscapes may once have produced. The resulting intervention is at once monumental and slightly absurd, transforming inherited geometries into a contemporary landscape that remains capable of surprise and of hosting public life. The project is well aware of contemporary landscape requirements, the ideological regimes that produced it, and situates them within the found historic outline. It objectifies the extravagance of the 18th-century formalism in the present time, hinting at its novelty and radicality centuries ago. Through a careful interplay of historical references, contemporary insertions and intentional anachronisms, the project constructs a rich palimpsest in which different eras and value systems remain visibly present and interact with each other. It offers a productive critique of how strong visual language does not obstruct our common effort to adapt to challenges of today. At the same time, a large part of the park, as experienced from the pedestrian’s perspective, appears as a simple meadow landscape that offers programmatic and design features connected through a geometry that holds these temporal layers together in a daring and unusually witty juxtaposition.

Het Breed is a modernist neighbourhood defined by rational residential blocks, 5 stories with ‘streets in the sky’ in Amsterdam North designed by the architect Frans Van Gool in 1963. The landscape design, which succeeded Van Gool’s plan in 1969, was inspired by modernist principles and is characterised by an extensive grid of plane trees […]

Play is about finding ones place in the world and making sense of that world. We have created a plan that seeks to juxtapose two different worlds. The man made and the natural. The plan has an urban exterior and a wild natural interior, each space contains a different type of play. The formal exterior […]