We talk with Gaetano Selleri and Giovanni Sanesi from PAN Associati, based in Milano, Italy, and Martí Franch from EMF, based in Girona, Spain about their “non-muscular” Parco della Pace park. The project received many accolades, including the LILA 2025 Jury Award, and was presented among the finalists for the Rosa Barba Award in Barcelona last year.

Excavated from a former military airfield, this “young park” is a masterclass in the anima vecchia (old soul) approach to landscape. By simply moving earth and letting groundwater reclaim the site, the team transformed a flat, rigid history into a dynamic “in-between” land of wetlands and ecotones.

Despite delays, financial hurdles, and the looming presence of an adjacent NATO base, the park has emerged as a low-cost, high-impact plea for a better future. Below, the designers discuss the “genius loci” of water, the surprises found during excavation, and why “non-muscular” design is the key to longevity.

The park is juxtaposed with military grounds on the former airfield. How did you address the relationship to the adjacent surroundings?

The project was born as a response to the city being forced to host yet another American military base (the third of its kind) located within the city’s disused airport. Starting in 2007, there was a very vibrant grassroots opposition movement. The name “Peace” emerged spontaneously, though in some instances it took the form of a direct—albeit never violent—opposition to the base itself, rather than a proactive promotion of peaceful values.

The Park’s design uses its relationship with nature and ecological dynamics as a source of great expressive power. At the same time, it is a project where the human hand and artificiality are clearly stated. We never tried to hide the Base; in fact, we treated it as the primary urban element to engage with. In this sense, placing the Park alongside the Base—which is so blunt and even crude in its assertion as a closed, independent urban core—is a positive act showing that a foundational intervention can exist with an entirely opposite intent.

Nature has done and will do the rest, which is certainly the most important part. It reminds me of the words of Isaiah: “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. The wild animals honor me, the jackals and the owls, because I provide water in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland, to give drink to my people…”

The water has emerged, the trees are growing, and the animals have arrived (not jackals and ostriches, but others), and finally, the people too. I believe this lush, free, and living presence has softened many hearts and led to a view of the park as a space that brings us closer to peace as a tangible possibility.

When I visited the park last August, it was unfortunately closed. Do you know for what reason it was, for ecological restoration or maintenance perhaps? 

The park was inaugurated in September 2025 after a long and gruelling period of finishing works that, in the end, were never fully realized. In reality, despite COVID and supply chain issues caused by the war in Ukraine, it was nearly finished by 2022. This gave us plenty of time to test it.

The hydraulic systems—managing groundwater emergence, flows, water levels, and containment—showed great stability and effectiveness from the start. We did face a water shortage in the summer of 2022 that dried up some basins for a few weeks, but it caused no lasting damage. Pioneer vegetation spread and stabilized very quickly, especially in the wetlands.

Wildlife colonized the park in massive numbers almost immediately, starting with waterfowl, followed by insects, fish, amphibians, mollusks, reptiles, and mammals. Despite the vast surface area of the water and the slow flow, we had no mosquito infestations—a sign that the habitat stabilized rapidly thanks to the presence of natural predators. We also weathered at least two intense storm events that used about 50% of the park’s retention capacity.

Regarding reforestation, we saw excellent results, particularly in the riparian woods and spontaneous growth areas. Other forested areas had higher failure rates (notably the pedunculate oaks, which weren’t in the original plan), partly due to clayey soil but also, unfortunately, due to imperfect maintenance of the irrigation systems.

Since the opening, we are finally seeing how the public uses the space. Initial feedback is encouraging; we saw 20,000 visitors on opening day. We were a close-knit, interdisciplinary team—landscape architects, agronomists, hydraulic and structural engineers, geologists—and we worked well because we shared the same goals. Given the project’s complexity, I had some concerns regarding the hydraulic aspects or ecological balances, but seeing everything work was a joy. My advice to colleagues is this: build teams with the right expertise, but more importantly, ensure everyone truly shares the project’s core vision.

Another point is public perception. A project like the Peace Park is hard to explain. The City Council itself perhaps didn’t fully grasp its scale and failed to communicate the ongoing work to the public. A park like this requires community involvement at every level; had that happened, we might have even opened sooner. Given its success, I believe we can make up for lost time.

How do you follow the maintenance schedule and collaborate with the client, Province of Vicenza, or the contractors? By leaving a big portion of the area to be self-seeded, you leave a lot to chance. Is there a monitoring of the process predicted?

We have not been commissioned to oversee the maintenance process or the monitoring. The Foundation established by the City, which will take over the Park, will certainly handle this. Regarding spontaneous growth, we are very optimistic, especially for the riparian forest environments. Nature must take its course, and we are confident it will do so beautifully. It is an essential part of understanding how the park and nature work, and conscious management processes must be initiated to reflect that.

Technically speaking, how did you manage soil and water to create such diverse ecotones? Did the embankments or water retention require specialized treatments, or was the process more straightforward than it appears?

I’ll be honest: it wasn’t difficult at all. We essentially “settled” for excavating and repositioning “only” 240,000 cubic meters of earth. Nature did the rest, including some minor erosion. The water containment structures are very simple and function entirely naturally; they don’t even require special adjustments or maintenance.

The excavation did give us some headaches but also some fascinating surprises, including the discovery of several WWII bombs, a Roman site, and a Neolithic site, along with the unfolding of ancient geological layers. But we made it through.

What advice would you offer colleagues working on decommissioned sites, particularly airfields? You’ve managed to turn a flat, rigid surface into a dynamic topography; how should others approach these types of large-scale transformations?

Generally speaking, after the Vicenza experience, I would say it’s vital to “listen” to the site: look for the good in every context, even industrial ones, and then let Nature help you. Invest primarily in that.

Adopt a “non-muscular” perspective that aims to trigger processes rather than demanding immediate results. This approach has two main benefits. First, it lowers costs—in Vicenza, the costs were remarkably low relative to the impact of the work. Second, it embraces longevity: Nature has the capacity to renew itself, unlike man-made structures which begin to decay the moment they are finished.