Feel UpTown, green UpTown!

admin — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 12:01:56 +0000

Feel Uptown – draining paving

Feel UpTown’s landscape design creates a vibrant, light-filled sanctuary in the heart of the R6 residential complex. Reinterpreting classic Milanese courtyard traditions, this green space opens up to and interacts seamlessly with Cascina Merlata Park.

Designed for Everyday Life

The elegant, minimalist layout serves a dual purpose: a functional space for daily living and a stunning visual garden when viewed from the upper floors. Flowerbeds are shaped into gentle hills. This design technique multiplies green perspectives and provides the necessary soil depth for thriving root systems. Walkways are crafted using carefully contrasted materials to deliver a rich, sensory experience underfoot. The organic forms designed by landscape architect Valerio Cozzi provide a soft counterpoint to the sharp geometries of Studio Labics’ buildings. The result is a welcoming, human-scale environment.

Feel UpTown trees

Feel UpTown trees are nearly fifty: flowering cherry trees (Prunus serrulata ‘Accolade’), magnolias (Magnolia liliflora ‘Susan’, M. soulangeana, M. tripetala), katsura trees (Cercidiphyllum japonicum) and Chionanthus retusus. The planting layout takes into account the size at maturity of each species, to let crowns grow free following their natural shape.

chionanthus-retusus

20+ green islands

Shrubs and evergreen herbaceous plants are establishing on the more than twenty green hills of the plaza which is a private space open to the public. The use of ground cover perennials instead of lawns is intended to protect the soil from wheather erosion and solar radiation. They will also create a favorable micro-climate that will reduce watering requirements. The arrangement of green islands is designed to maximize freedom of movement in the area and privacy for residents on the ground floor.

Anemones and ferns have taken their place in the cooler flower beds. The concept of the Feel UpTown green courtyard is inspired to the often overlooked importance of private courtyards for the city of Milan. Set apart from the city buzz, they are quiet and cool islands inhabited by evergreen foliage or unassuming blooms, such as aspidistra and bergenia.

2,000 sqm green roof

Feel UpTown green heart is a 2,000 sqm intensive green roof located above a level reserved to residents. The isles are obtained layering lightweight soil, water storage and drainage technical materials to root systems and structural needs. The courtyard is accessible from via Pier Paolo Pasolini and from Parco Cascina Merlata through wide staircases and ramps accompanied by trees.

Feel UpTown and SuDS

The entire Feel UpTown green courtyard project has been designed to support sustainable urban drainage systems (SuDS) in Milan. Not a single raindrop is lost or causes the underground civil systems to overload. Both the green area, which covers approximately 1,000 square metres, and the paving allow rainwater to infiltrate the underlying layers and reach the storage tanks, from which the irrigation system draws water.

The concrete slabs that make up the paths are grouted with aggregates bound by permeable bio-resins.

FEEL UPTOWN

Where: Milan, Cascina Merlata
Landscaped area: 1,925 sqm
Year: 2019-2020 (project), 2024-2025 (construction)
Real estate developer: EuroMilano
Architectural project: Labics
Structural and MEP project: SIO Engineering
Irrigation project: Paolo Pessina, agronomist
Landscape project: Valerio Cozzi architetto landscape designer
Landscape services: Concept, Preliminary Design, Detailed Design, Construction Assistance on landscape-related topics

The construction works of the green court

feel-uptown-r6 (8)

At the end of 2025, vegetation conquered the islands that are the hallmark of the new R6 residential complex in the booming Cascina Merlata neighborhood.

Read the review of the project here

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Parco dei conigli, San Donato Milanese

admin — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 17:48:47 +0000

The landmark of the ‘Rabbits Park’ is actually… a hare! One of the designer’s tasks is to understand the place where he or she intervenes, to discover its genius loci […]. Once we would have called it its tutelary deity, a spiritual entity to respect and venerate. A way of seeing that, perhaps, we are recovering in some way, if we consider today’s attention to the environment.

Valerio Cozzi, the designer

Parco dei Conigli, which means ‘Rabbits Park’, in San Donato Milanese, is called after the local wildlife and its traditional association with the positive concepts of rebirth, spring and resilience.

Under construction, the new park will rise along the renowned and expanding Polyclinic in the southeast area of the Metropolitan City of Milan. The plot has been left over both from agricultural and from urban dynamics, after a solid rural background. With the aim to give back to the community this piece of land, landscape designers Massimo Semola and Valerio Cozzi went in search of the traces left by its agricultural heritage. Signs that are sometimes still visible from the ground, sometimes with aerial photos or by studying the archives.

Greenways

The landscape project recovers the forgotten country gravel lanes, by now reduced to thin tracks, transforming them into comfortable cycle and pedestrian paths. The new trails allow to explore the park in long tours, to cross it straight from one end to the other. The South Milan Agricultural Park will also be a comfortable ride from the city centre.

Biodiversity

In addition to the connection of the Parco dei Conigli with the greenways of the area, the rebirth of the place is entrusted to the growth of a quality environment. To support biodiversity and to reinforce the ecological corridor represented by the dismissed irrigation ditch ‘Roggia Cavenaga’, vegetation is pivotal. That’s why the project recovers, integrates or replaces – when invasive or compromised – the unkempt vegetation. Plant species will be native or edible fruit, tree and shrub species such as Acer campestre, Carpinus betulus, Corylus avellana, Euonymus europaeus, Malus sylvestris, Prunus spinosa, Quercus robur, Tilia cordata. The intent is to expand the birds’ and small mammals ’areal of the near South Milan Agricultural Park.

Layout

The project of the Parco dei Conigli takes up the linearity of the rural landscape that characterized the area before urban expansion, in the 1950s. Tree species, location and density comply with the requirements of the hospital heliport and Linate airport.

A forested strip frames the central wide meadow, while tree rows foster the visual exploration through long, obstacle-free perspectives. Playgrounds and picnic areas, all next to the city edge, will introduce people to the wider wonder that is nature.

Construction works, started in September 2021 by the San Donato Group to compensate for the extension of the Polyclinic, will redevelop an area of about 90 thousand square meters.

The Park in February 2023 – photo credits arch. Massimo Semola

parco-dei-conigli_foto-di-massimo-semola__11

Project data

Where: San Donato Milanese, Milan, Italy
Area: approximately 90,000 sm
In collaboration with: arch. Massimo Semola, dr. agr. Paolo Alleva
Year: 2020-2021 (project), construction in progress
Services: Preliminary, definitive and executive design, coordinated and integrated design

Published on:

Topscape #43/2021

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