Park Associati

Turning the Past into the Future IQD 78

BIOGRAPHY

Founded in 2000 by Filippo Pagliani and Michele Rossi, Park is a practice working across architecture, urban design, interior design, and product design. Park’s story began in a converted flat, an intimate space with a few workstations, a model room, and a small kitchen, where the studio took its first steps and began to shape its identity. From the very beginning, an open and collaborative design culture defined our practice, fostering dialogue and the exchange of ideas, an approach that remains at the core of our methodology today. Over time, Park evolved, expanding both its scope and research-driven vision while deepening its impact across disciplines. In 2013, we moved into a former telephone factory in Milan’s Città Studi district, marking a new phase in our growth. By 2018, the space expanded to welcome nearly 100 collaborators, solidifying Park as a collective of architects, designers, and researchers shaping new ways of thinking and designing for the built environment. At Park, every project is an opportunity to explore the intersection of innovation and tradition, function and emotion, vision and responsibility. We believe in architecture as a tool for transformation – of cities, spaces, and experiences – designed to shape a more conscious and connected future. We design across scales and disciplines, from workplaces and housing to retail, hospitality, and masterplans. Our projects balance vision and pragmatism, shaping spaces that are rooted in context and built for purpose. We create workplaces for public and private clients, such as Palazzo Sistema and the Salewa Headquarters, that go beyond function to support identity and well-being. In the residential field, projects like Consorzio Agrario and Le Altane di Lambrate explore new ways of living in the city. From immersive retail environments to large-scale urban regeneration, like Pirelli 35, Torre della Permanente, and MoLeCoLa, we turn complexity into opportunity, designing sustainable, resilient spaces for the future.

Turning the Past into the Future

Architecture is an evolving process, a system that develops over time through adaptations, layering, and rewriting. Every building carries with it the memory of the context in which it was born and, at the same time, the potential for a new life. Today, rethinking the existing is more than ever a necessity: contemporary society can no longer operate according to the logic of replacement, but must refine its ability to adapt, regenerate, and overwrite. Contemporary built heritage – often perceived as obsolete – becomes the raw material for new projects, in which the existing is not an obstacle, but a driver of innovation. Intervening on the existing is not a nostalgic operation, nor a simple exercise in sustainability. It is a design perspective that values the built environment as a resource, reduces land consumption, lowers environmental impact and enhances the quality of inhabited space. It is a concrete response to the urban challenges of today, a new idea of the future: a future that does not erase, but stratifies. The recovery of a building can be a gesture of minimal impact or a radical transformation; it can involve simple respect for the original envelope or a functional and technological renovation. Sometimes, architectural material is reused as a resource, through urban mining processes, which allow for the recovery, rethinking and reuse of materials and construction elements from buildings at the end of their life. In other cases, we focus on reworking spaces, making it possible to change the building’s purpose, overturning the functions for which it was originally conceived. In our work, we believe that every project must arise from a deep understanding of its context. The identity of a place is never static, but is the result of a series of relationships, with space, with material, with users. Intervening on the existing means immersing oneself in this complexity, embracing the stratification of time, and reinterpreting it through a vision, that is new, unique and consistent in each of its elements. Every intervention on an existing building is an act of listening and interpretation, it is a dialogue with time, where the challenge is to redefine, reveal new possibilities and bring out the latent identity of a place. While building from scratch is an act of assertion, reusing is an act of respect and sensitivity: it means recognizing the potential of the existing and transforming it into a new model of sustainability, aesthetics and livability. We have made the interpretation and transformation of the past a constant design practice, a perspective through which to view the city and its future. Our experience has been shaped by engagement with Milanese modernism, with its modular logic and openness to transformation. Today we continue to expand this reflection, exploring new technologies and processes that make reuse an increasingly strategic choice. We thank IQD Magazine for giving us the opportunity to curate this issue, allowing us to share our vision through an open dialogue with professionals and organizations that are contributing to redefine the future of the built environment. With this collection of reflections and projects, we aim to offer a perspective on an architecture that does not merely respond to the needs of the present, but anticipates them, reinterpreting the built environment as a resource and heritage for future generations. We have selected a series of recent interventions – realized over the past five years – characterized by different scales, types, and backgrounds, through which a vision of architecture as an open, continuously evolving system emerges. It is not just about preservation but about re-signifying: every intervention generates a new dialogue with the context, with contemporary needs and with future possibilities. Atelier Oslo transforms a listed building into a contemporary communications hub, Gustav Düsing, in collaboration with FAKT, adapts a former printing house into a new university campus, and Prokš Přikryl Architekti turns a grain silo into a multifunctional space for conferences and art, preserving its expressive power. KAAN Architecten extends the Antwerp Museum within the original footprint, avoiding creating a new icon for the city and emphasizing the institution’s enduring value. Carles Enrich moves the project to an almost archaeological level, in which working on the existing becomes an act of care and revelation. Even Vector Architects interweaves recovery and landscape, integrating a former sugar factory with its surrounding environment to create an immersive experience. Chartier Dalix broadens the perspective: in Rue des Poissonniers, reuse is not only an architectural operation, but an urban strategy that intertwines memory, sustainability and quality of living. We hope that this selection of projects will offer the reader insights and a broad and multifaceted perspective on a theme that is not only architectural, but also cultural and social. Transforming the existing is an extraordinary opportunity to rethink the relationship between architecture, time, and community.