“Flormart” at the Padua Fair and the international competition to design urban greenery.
To be sustainable, a city must have large areas of public green space. With this in mind and knowing that Italy’s capitals reserve an average of 32 square meters of green space per inhabitant, Flormart, the floriculture and gardening show, scheduled to take place at the Padua Fairgrounds from Sept. 9 to 11, 2015, is launching the international “Flormart Garden Show” competition for “Green Week of the Venices.” An initiative to enhance the design of urban green spaces, understood as valuable architectural elements capable of contributing to qualifying cities. The call is aimed at landscape architects, designers, design firms, students, flower and ornamental plant companies, and all green and landscape professionals. “In recent years,” explains PadovaFiere CEO Daniele Villa, “trade fairs are called upon to be as much showcases for exhibitions as they are meeting places capable of stimulating reflections that produce change and suggest new paths. The proposal of the international competition stems precisely from this spirit: we are convinced that from the meeting between the know-how of floriculture companies and architects and designers from all over Europe and beyond, synergies and collaborations capable of offering unprecedented solutions can take shape.” The challenge starts precisely in Padua, a city that is characterized (the latest Istat report on environmental quality notes) by a higher presence of urban green areas than the national average: 8.8 percent of the municipal territory in 2013 (the national figure is 2.7 percent), equal to 39.1 square meters per inhabitant. The competing proposals will be screened by a panel of experts chaired by Giorgio Strappazzon, an architect from the firm Vs associati who designed the new Botanical Garden of Padua after winning with the project “The Garden of Biodiversity,” the international competition announced by the University of Padua.
Also on the committee were Daniele Villa, Spanish architect Manuel Palerm Salazar president of Uniescape (a network among European universities engaged in landscape research), Lucia Bortolini professor of the Land and Agroforestry Systems Department of the University of Padua, Giuseppe Cappochin president of the Padua Order of Architects, Novella Cappelletti editor of Paysage magazine and Giampaolo Barbariol, head of the Green Department of the City of Padua. “In the world of architecture, but also among local administrators,” Strapazzon explains, “there is growing sensitivity to the issue of integrating architecture and landscape, partly because the current model of development is no longer sustainable. In the Veneto region we have an ancient tradition in this sense: just think of the Venetian villas, a model of harmonious union between architecture and landscape. Starting from this reality, but with an eye to the future, the idea of the competition was born, which aims precisely to give voice to those who are experimenting with new paths.” Sponsored by the University of Padua and the National Order of Architects, Landscape Planners and Conservators, the competition includes a total prize pool of ten thousand euros and two sections reserved for works or cultural projects that have already been completed and the selection of eight projects to be implemented at the Padua Fair during Flormart 2015. The competition will make use of the synergy with the international forum “Ecotech Green,” which will offer innovative technologies applied to green.
From: Il Corriere del Veneto, Feb. 16, 2015 – by Ro.Bru