Portello Park – Work completed

If the circle is the measure of time, today, 23 November 2022, the end of work on Portello Park closes many of them. Started more than 20 years ago with the efforts of Ennio Brion, a unique promoter of quality architecture and design, together with two brilliant minds, Gino Valle and Charles Jencks, Milan will finally be able to enjoy the entirety of the landmark masterpiece in memory of the former Alfa Romeo fabric.

From the left: LAND CEO Andreas Kipar, Managing Director and Director Real Estate Development of Finiper Canova group SpA Marco Carabelli, Councillor for Urban Regeneration Giancarlo Tancredi.

The Alfa Romeo Industrial Park at Portello was built in lots from 2009-10 on the brownfield site of the 1980s. The first part was opened to citizens in 2011, followed by a second lot in 2015 and 2017. Andreas Kipar, together with LAND S.r.l. and Charles Jencks – the great US landscape architect and leading theorist of modernism and postmodernism in landscape architecture who passed away in 2019 – structured the park from a series of circular spatial lines that form the construction lines of the three ‘green sculptures’: Mound1, Mound2, Mound3, which together with the small garden called Time Garden represent different scans of time – Prehistory, History, Present and individual time: “An interweaving of circles and lines that echo the course of time both circular and linear, repetitive like the heartbeat and sequential like evolution,” says Andreas Kipar.

From a morphological point of view, the park develops at different heights recovered through a system of paths called “Time Walk”. In a broader perspective of relationship with the city, the Portello park is also part of a green system of pedestrian and bicycle paths: the so-called “Green Rays” that, passing beyond the ring roads, connect the centre of Milan to the hinterland.

Thanks to the initiative of IPER MONTEBELLO S.p.a., owned by the entrepreneur Marco Brunelli, who entrusted LAND with the task of drawing up the final design of the green areas, the heavily abandoned lot between Viale Serra to the south-east, Viale De Gasperi to the south-west and the park to the north has been handed back to the citizens.

The inspiration for the design of the latter part came from the astral bodies of the Sun and Moon and their interactions with the Earth: the name chosen for the new part of the park is, in fact, ‘Moon Garden’. The shape of the park was inspired by Athanasius Kircher’s ‘Phases of the Moon’ diagram, where the lunar cycle is represented as a double spiral for both hemispheres of the Earth, and where these shapes depict the duration of the moon’s visibility in the sky, with its rising and setting. The upward spiral path features shaded resting places with benches. Fifty trees including maples, liriodendrons, lime trees, mulberry trees and soforas alternate with 1,500 square metres of colourful flowerbeds with herbaceous and shrubby plants and groups of rhododendrons. This last lot bears the mark of the great landscape architect Charles Jencks, whose principles guided the moderation of the park and the entire redevelopment process. His legacy to the Milanese citizenry, which is now increasingly connected to nature.

Portello Park, approximately 73,000 square metres, is now a large green lung for Milan. A park where one can feel free to experience the rhythm of time because, as Jencks himself wrote in 2009: “Landscapes and gardens always bear the imprint of time on their surfaces, in their growth and decay”.