Heart of stone, landscape project for the urban park of the marsala quarries

The evolution of the contemporary city, along with its lifestyle, carries the topic of how to approach those areas that have represented important focal points in the past, but are nowadays unused. The quarries, despite their relevant role in the birth of the city, represent one of the main issues of this topic. The evolution of the construction techniques led to a decreased demand of stone extraction and, in many cases, areas like the quarries are nowadays laying like open wounds in the urban tissue, generating large disconnections. La Polveriera, in which this project is located, takes its name after being an underground ammunition storage after the Second World War. Because of its layout, this site perfectly matches the issues outlined above and the urban park proposal tries to solve them by reconnecting the area to the urban tissue, allowing its fruition. The project unfolds from the paths theme, developing two of them, in the effort of preserving the memory of a place whose main strength and beauty was the ability to remain a pristine crust of land. The first path raises on a walkway linking the largest quarries, so that you can observe them - and even go through them - from a privileged point of view; the second one is an elevated path that allows you to explore the rest of the site. These two paths then become connecting elements for the multi-functions housed in the urban park: from the multi-age playground, to the sensory gardens and parking spaces.