The Don Bosco Courtyard project stems from the collaboration between the G124 group, founded by Renzo Piano, the ArCoD Department of the Polytechnic University of Bari, and the Municipality of Bari, with the goal of regenerating degraded public spaces in urban peripheries.
By integrating the objectives of the research project GreenVille. Visions and projects for the renewal of public housing districts in the city of Bari with the development strategies of the local administration, the intervention was located in the San Paolo district: a “satellite” settlement built between the 1950s and 1960s on the outskirts of the city, now home to over 30,000 residents. In this context, the fragmentation of the urban fabric and the lack of services and public spaces have fueled social marginalization, further worsening the already low environmental and spatial quality of the neighborhood.
The project area corresponds to the triangular space of Via Saverio Altamura: a paved surface of approximately 7,000 square meters, interrupted only by a few sparse trees along its edges. The lack of identity of this space, combined with total impermeability of the ground and the absence of shade, had turned it into a heat island, uninhabitable during daylight hours, especially in summer. A condition that clashed with the layout of the surrounding buildings: linear blocks that frame the area and face it with the most lived-in parts of the home – kitchens and living rooms.
The project reinterprets this residual space as a large domestic courtyard: a hypostyle architecture among the buildings, a garden marked by a dense grid of evergreen trees arranged in a staggered (quincunx) pattern. Two are the main transformative actions of the project: the removal of impermeable paving and the creation of a garden that, over time, will generate a continuous green canopy formed by 121 new laurel trees (Laurus nobilis). In dialogue with a few existing holm oaks, the trunks of these new evergreens – like columns – articulate the space of the hypostyle courtyard with a rhythm that anticipates the growth of the foliage and enables the formation of a triangular vegetative roof.
The transformation of the soil, in line with the character of the garden, is achieved using natural stabilized earth, which ensures proper drainage while conveying, through its rough compactness, a distinctive sense of domesticity. Following the site’s natural slope, this uniform, earthy character of the ground finds a significant variation in a clearing: an open-air room shaped by the thickness of the green canopy – a luminous space intended for collective activities.
The presence of this clearing is marked by a ring-shaped staircase that, like a podium (constructed using site debris), defines a raised circular platform in contrast to the sloping surface of the courtyard. Here, a stone bench further defines the atmosphere of the “room,” emphasizing the circular concavity of the space through its sculpted profile.
In this way, through an architecture of soil and trees, the Don Bosco Courtyard expresses the values of urban reforestation, aiming above all to redefine the forms and practices of urban life and to interpret the relationship between nature and public space within the context of a city open to the territory.
