Openfabric, caarpa and FM Ingegneria Recast the Grounds of the Reggia di Rivalta as a 25-Hectare Public Park

The Park of the Reggia di Rivalta opened in June 2025 across 250,000 square meters of historic ground in Italy. It is the work of three practices: the landscape studio Openfabric, the Genova-based architects caarpa, and the engineers FM Ingegneria. A reggia is a seat of power, and its gardens were built to be looked at from the palace windows. This project takes that inheritance and asks what it should do now, when the people walking through it are cyclists, families and teenagers looking for a bench in the shade.

What interests us is the refusal to choose between restoration and reinvention. The team keeps the formal skeleton: the central axis, the symmetrical parterres, the circular basins. They then lay a second geometry over it, a fan of diagonal paths and planted wedges that reads as contemporary land art from the air. Old brick bastions stay rough. New concrete walls stay clean. Fog, frost and poppies are treated as part of the design. The result is a park that is honest about being both heritage and infrastructure.

A Baroque Axis Meets a Radiating Field

From above, the plan does two things at once. Near the entrance, the parterres and basins hold their mirrored order, as a garden attached to a palace should. Farther out, the ground opens into wedge-shaped lawns that radiate from circular pavilions, and these pull the eye toward the village at the edge. The geometry is formal, but it no longer points only back at the palace.

The central avenue is where the two systems negotiate. Grass strips, pollarded trees and white benches give it the rhythm of a historic allée, yet it is paved, lit and wide enough for everyday use. In fog it dissolves into a single vanishing line, which is probably the most convincing argument for keeping the axis at all.

Water You Can Sit Beside

The basins are shallow, low-rimmed and lined with small jets instead of monumental sprays. That scale matters. Children lean over the edge, cyclists stop to cool down, and movable green metal chairs let people set up wherever the shade falls. Ornamental water has become a social device.

The movable chairs are a quiet but pointed decision. Fixed seating tells visitors where to be. Loose chairs let them decide, and in a park this size that kind of self-organization keeps the central gardens from feeling like a museum display.

Letting the Old Walls Stay Old

The weathered brick bastion, with its arched and barred openings, has not been scrubbed back to a postcard version of itself. The mortar is patchy, the arches are stained, and the gates still close. Children peering through the bars are reading the wall as something with a history behind it, which is exactly the right reaction.

Beside the bastion, a white stepped amphitheatre turns an old defensive edge into a place to gather. The contrast is deliberate and blunt: new work is pale, smooth and geometric, and it never tries to imitate the brick it sits next to.

New Edges in Concrete and Metal

Where the park needs new boundaries, the team uses curving white concrete walls and a pale translucent fence set on top of the existing brick. The fence keeps the enclosure the site needs without adding visual weight to the historic wall. It reads more like a veil than a barrier.

The golden curved railing above a rough stone retaining edge shows the same thinking at handrail scale. The stone stays coarse and the metal stays refined, and the junction between them is left visible. You always know which layer is new.

Stairs, Ramps and Changes in Level

The level changes between the formal gardens and the bastion ground are handled with curved brick stairs and steel-edged treads. Worn original steps are kept beside the new ones, so the two eras of movement run in parallel. The steel nosings are precise but thin, a detail you notice when you look down rather than when you look at the view.

Photographed in heavy fog, these stairs show how much the park relies on texture over spectacle. When the distance disappears, the brick, the steel and the curve of the wall carry the experience on their own.

Steel Arches as Garden Architecture

The slender steel arches standing in the meadows are the project's most recognizable new element. They recall the trellises and pergolas of historic gardens but are stripped back to bare frames. In summer they are almost lost in tall grass. In winter they become drawings against the fog.

We like that the arches are not yet fully overgrown and do not pretend to be. They frame the grasses and red-stemmed shrubs around them, and they will gain their real character as planting climbs them over the next decade. The design is clearly built for that timeline.

Promenades and Furniture at Human Scale

The wide white gravel promenade under mature trees is the park's everyday room: walkers, low stone benches and dappled shade. Long concrete benches beside slim lamp posts give groups a place to settle, and the lighting is restrained enough that the trees remain the main event.

The terrazzo bench with flecked aggregate and a bent metal armrest is a small object that tells you a lot about the project's care. Its material connects to the pale gravel and white walls, and the armrest is practical rather than decorative. Good park furniture should be this unfussy.

A Park That Changes With the Season

Poppies and dry grasses in early summer, orange oak leaves in autumn, bare pollarded trees in fog: the photographs move through the whole year, and the park is designed to hold up in all of it. The meadows are not mown into uniform lawn, which supports the ecological ambitions and gives the place a looser, more rural edge.

At dusk, lit paths and white benches keep the gardens usable after sunset, with the water tower on the hill acting as a landmark. Where pale gravel meets dark water, a long arc of shadow shows how carefully the edges have been drawn.

Plans and Drawings

The colored site plan makes the layering clear: a walled enclosure, a central axis, formal gardens near the entrance, and diagonal planted fields across the rest of the ground. The diagram series breaks the scheme into its systems, separating the perimeter boulevard, the diagonal paths, the planted areas and the central park. Read together, they show a project assembled from distinct, legible layers instead of a single composition.

Why This Project Matters

Italy has no shortage of historic gardens that are either frozen in restoration or left to decay. The Park of the Reggia di Rivalta offers a third path. It keeps the formal bones of a palace landscape, puts new structures beside the old ones without disguising either, and opens 25 hectares to ordinary daily use. Shallow basins, movable chairs and long benches turn a place of display into a place of occupation.

For designers working on heritage landscapes, the lesson is in the restraint. Openfabric, caarpa and FM Ingegneria let the brick stay weathered, let the meadows grow, and let the new steel and concrete stay quiet. The park will take years to fully mature, and the design accepts that. A public landscape built to improve with time is a more useful model than one built to look finished on opening day.

Park of the Reggia di Rivalta by Openfabric, caarpa and FM Ingegneria, Italy. Area: 250,000 m². Completed: 2025. Photography: Jacopo Gennari Feslikenian – JGF | ph., Tiwi, Bruno Cattani, Andrea Colzani, Giulia Ansaldi, Diego Arbore.

About the Studio

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If projects like this are the kind of work you want to make, uni.xyz is a place to publish your own, find collaborators, and enter design competitions.