Why you should experience Biblioteca degli Alberi in Milan, Italy.
Biblioteca degli Alberi is an inventive botanical park where Porta Nuova's postindustrial reinvention, experimental landscape architecture, environmental art and extraordinary plant diversity converge across a new connective landscape between Isola and Milan's contemporary skyline.
Set along Via Gaetano de Castillia near Via Melchiorre Gioia and just steps from Bosco Verticale, the park occupies ground that remained largely inaccessible for more than half a century before Porta Nuova converted the fragmented territory between Garibaldi, Isola and the former Varesine lands into a continuous pedestrian district, giving the landscape project the unusual task of physically reconnecting parts of Milan long divided by railway and infrastructure. Intersecting paths cut through irregular fields, flowering meadows and circular groves, turning movement across the site into the organizing principle of a garden. More than 500 trees form 22 circular forests among 135,000 additional plants, allowing individual botanical groupings to function as changing outdoor rooms within the surrounding towers. The result is a botanical park where landscape architecture does more than soften Porta Nuova's density, using vegetation and movement to reconnect urban territory that spent decades physically separated.
What you should know about Biblioteca degli Alberi.
Biblioteca degli Alberi is best known for Petra Blaisse and Inside Outside's winning proposal for the Giardini di Porta Nuova international competition, which transformed the conventional idea of a central urban park into a botanical library organized through paths, irregular plots and circular forests. Milan launched the competition in 2003, and the Dutch team won first prize in February 2004 after more than 50 international studios entered and ten finalists were selected. Blaisse's multidisciplinary competition team included Michael Maltzan, Mirko Zardini, Irma Boom, Rod'or and planting designer Piet Oudolf, bringing architecture, urbanism, graphic design and horticulture into the conception of a single landscape. The design treated routes arriving from the surrounding residential, commercial and institutional districts as generative lines, overlapping them into a network whose intersections created the park's irregular fields. Circular forests were scattered through that geometry so different tree species would eventually create elevated canopies with distinct structures and seasonal appearances, establishing the botanical collection as architecture in its own right. The completed park extends across 10 hectares and contains more than 100 plant species, over 500 trees arranged into 22 circular forests and 135,000 aromatic plants, hedges, shrubs, bulbs, climbers and herbaceous specimens. After a development process extending well beyond the original competition, Biblioteca degli Alberi opened on October 27, 2018, completing the central landscape component envisioned for Porta Nuova fourteen years earlier. Blaisse's intersecting routes, Oudolf's planting contribution and the 22 forest rooms turned botanical classification into a physical method for stitching together one of Milan's largest contemporary urban transformations.
Agnes Denes gave the future park an extraordinary temporary life three years before its completion when Wheatfield occupied five hectares of the site during Expo 2015. The American artist revisited the concept behind her celebrated 1982 Manhattan intervention by planting wheat among Porta Nuova's new towers, placing agricultural production on ground already destined for Blaisse's metropolitan garden. Creating the Milan field required 15,500 cubic meters of soil, 1,250 kilograms of Odisseo wheat seed and about 5,000 kilograms of fertilizer, with residents participating in cultivation and harvest through the wider MiColtivo initiative. Public participation entered the permanent landscape again before opening through PercorsiPoetici, which drew contributions from more than 500 Milanese residents and placed 20 winning phrases directly into the park's paths. Another experiment followed in 2019 when Milan, COIMA and Fondazione Riccardo Catella established the city's first public-private partnership for management of a public park, assigning the foundation a ten-year role after its earlier involvement with cultural activity on the site. The foundation subsequently developed a free cultural program exceeding 300 events annually, extending the park's original botanical concept into a continuing calendar of performances, workshops and collective activity. Denes's wheat field, citizen-written pathways and the later cultural program turned the long-delayed landscape into a sequence of artistic and civic experiments whose development began before its trees had reached maturity.
How to fold Biblioteca degli Alberi into your trip.
Biblioteca degli Alberi works as the anchor for a daytime progression through a nineteenth-century railway building recovered for civic culture, Milan's defining experiment in vegetated high-rise architecture and the elevated plaza that reorganized pedestrian movement across Porta Nuova.
Begin at Fondazione Riccardo Catella, housed in a late nineteenth-century railway warehouse that acquired radically different lives after its original industrial purpose disappeared. The structure subsequently became a film set and a contemporary art laboratory before a major restoration returned it to active use in 2006, one year after the Catella family established the foundation in memory of Riccardo Catella. Its survival preserves a fragment of the railway territory that preceded Porta Nuova's towers, giving the district's contemporary cultural activity a physical connection with the infrastructure displaced by redevelopment. Continue to Bosco Verticale, where Boeri Studio placed extensive vegetation across two residential towers rising 76 and 100 meters and completed the project in 2014. Roughly 800 trees and thousands of shrubs and other plants occupy projecting balconies across the two buildings, and the project received the 2014 International Highrise Award from the Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt and DekaBank. Conclude at Piazza Gae Aulenti, where Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects created an elevated circular plaza as the principal public center of Porta Nuova Garibaldi. Opened in 2012 and named for architect and designer Gae Aulenti shortly after her death, the piazza sits several meters above surrounding streets and organizes pedestrian routes among the UniCredit complex, Garibaldi station and the surrounding developments. The progression moves from a railway warehouse surviving the district's industrial past through Boeri lifting hundreds of trees onto residential towers into Pelli reorganizing movement around an elevated civic square, exposing the architectural experiments that prepared Porta Nuova for Biblioteca degli Alberi.
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