Sensational Garden: Frosinone’s First Public Space

Nabito Architects have designed the “Sensational Garden” in the city of Frosinone, Italy.

The neighbourhood of Corso Lazio, in the city of Frosinone, Italy, can finally enjoy its first public space, that it has been expecting for 25 years now.

The sensational garden represents the starting point of a big masterplan to renew and integrate the public spaces and the services to the residential neighbourhood. The lack of public spaces degraded the entire area, and the neighbourhood had become an unsustainable dormitory.

For this reason the project for the sensational garden amplifies the idea of a relational space filling the social void with an explosive, playful, sensorial and interactive intimate room, like a personal living room in a public realm.

The garden is constantly in tension between artificial and natural elements. It is a garden in which users and citizens can find the joy of life, love and get to know each other again and make themselves comfortable with the entire neighbourhood, thus renewing the social sustainability of this site in Frosinone. The continuous fight to obtain and respect a citizen’s right to a public space has characterized the development of the building site. In this case we verify a very big paradox.

The commission was public, but the realization was forced by our private will “helping” the city hall and department of public works to accomplish his duty: the good of the community. Nabito Architects and Partners won in 2011 an unsustainable battle for the citizens’ rights that started three years ago.

The goal of the project is to invite users to a path in which the scene is always changing. The user will have the sensation of discovering an always-different space but with the same kind of characteristic. The five human senses are the main theme of the space; the materials and vegetation will relate to them.

The user will not have an entire look over the park, but he will do through a series of the different senses. The variation of height, inclination, and dimensional games is part of the ludic peculiarity of the park.

They use the senses as a big metaphor. They use senses to relate themselves with surroundings and other people. Each area is a metaphor of one of the five human senses and humans are constantly called to put themselves in relation with the space. The path is a discovery, and it was designed to leave the spaces to be revealed to a visitor little by little, so to induce and encourage the visitor of continuing the experience.

Five Big Devices contain the essence and the poetry of the metaphor. A path is the link between them. The smell is attracted by the support of the essences, hearing, from the game sound amplification, view, from the beautiful rose garden, touch, from feeling the materials of the central cone, and finally, taste stimulated by the fruit trees in the largest support. The balanced blend of the natural essences (trees, shrubs and flowers) and the artificial elements (cement and resin) make the garden not only easy to maintain but also simultaneously durable and mutable.