ecological design

If the eighteenth-century landscape garden is mainly for private leisure, the metropolitan park is characterized by an institutional and urban aspect. This is the main diffirence between them.

The “central park” is, to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin, an urban equipment, it is conceived according moral and hygienic purposes, it is a part of the city. From the formal point of view, landscape architects of the nineteenth century like P. J. Lenné, J. Paxton, F.L. Olmsted, conceived the park as an alternation of concavities and convexities. These figures define a continuous flux and allow to obtain a total circularity, a kind of movement necessary to the personal enjoyment of the park.

In the central park the arabesque runs everywhere, putting every situation in relation to the whole.

The arabesque figure is linked to the impressionism and to the metropolitan image of the moving crowd. Passing from “The Man of the Crowd” a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe to the flaneur of Benjaminian figure of the flaneur, the central park organizes the intensities, the sounds, depths of space of the metropolitan city.