PAN Associati

Parco della Pace is a transformation of a former airport into a vast ecological machine that operates simultaneously as water infrastructure, biodiversity habitat, and public space. Parco della Pace offers a complex interplay of geometries—traces of the former runway, the rigid grids of adjacent military grounds, and the superimposed logic of new water systems—generating a distinct spatial language that remains legible at multiple scales.

What distinguishes this project is its unapologetic embrace of scale, engineering, and earthworks, yet without sacrificing ecological subtlety. The site functions as a large-scale detention basin, integrating hydrological processes into a resilient landscape capable of absorbing and slowly releasing floodwaters. Water becomes both technical infrastructure and ecological mediator, generating new habitat edges and transitional ecotones that allow species to recolonize this former infrastructural void.

Beyond its technical accomplishments, Parco della Pace also offers a productive ambiguity between program and process. Today, it offers a base that is generous, extensive, and resolutely territorial in scale. In time, it will negotiate between the formal and the open-ended, between cultural programming and wilderness zones left to self-organisation. The project resists the impulse for total scripting, instead establishing a layered framework that will evolve across ecological time. In this sense, the park presents a form of engineered openness, where large-scale interventions initiate processes whose full resolution remains necessarily incomplete.