THE BRICK GARDEN
The Brick Garden project was conceived in Crocefieschi, a small village in the Ligurian inland that has historically been a summer destination for the Genoese. The village is nestled among woods and rock formations, including the striking Rocche del Reopasso: imposing, smooth masses of conglomerate rock that emerge from the vegetation like petrified dunes. In this fragile landscape, marked by a delicate balance between nature and human presence, the area of intervention - the garden of a private home - is located just outside the town, on a steep slope that has long been abandoned. A forgotten place that bears the signs of decay but also the potential for redemption.
Like the Rocche del Reopasso, the project works on the idea of the “emergence” of artificial elements interacting with natural ones. The Brick Garden thus becomes a testing ground for a new idea of a garden: a space that intertwines matter and landscape, nature and construction.
The aim is to give a new life to a disused area, transforming the existing terraces - made with wooden palisades and waste materials - into new habitable places, designed as spaces for rest, interaction and visual connection with the surrounding landscape.
The different terraces are connected by a few essential elements: bricks, gravel and rebars. These define the boundaries of the terraces and at the same time they connect them, creating a unified and continuous garden.
The path winds from the highest terrace, at street level, down to the intermediate level, where the house is located. Here, a small area offers a place to rest, connected to the greenery of the linear garden composition adjacent to the house.
The garden continues to the lower level, at the edge of the woods, where a second area marks the transition between the designed garden and the natural one: a place for contemplation.
Amidst the terraces, the slopes are planted with climbing plants which, over time, will grow along the iron railings, gradually incorporating the existing wooden fences. The existing terraces will be gradually shielded by vertical rebars that form a “wall” which becomes a boundary and support for new vegetation over time.
The Brick Garden is not just an external landscaping project, but a symbolic act of
regeneration. Once a degraded area, a new hybrid landscape is taking shape today: a living composition between design and nature.
A constructed landscape where architecture interacts with nature through matter.
