The Giardini Margherita Greenhouses become a new metropolitan hub. A fine regeneration project in the heart of Bologna.

The Greenhouses of this Bologna park have been transformed into a new urban hub, with spaces for exhibitions, education, cultural events and music and eating and drinking, as well as offices and facilities to be shared on a co-working basis.

A project led by the City of Bologna, with aid from the Emilia-Romagna Region, Fondazione Golinelli, Kilowatt, ASTER and Coop Adriatica, focusing on an upgraded area of 650 square metres next to the municipal Greenhouses in the Giardini Margherita, the city’s largest, most popular park.

Here, thanks to the design of Laprimastanza, Kilowatt has undertaken an urban regeneration project on the indoor and outdoor areas, restoring features linked to the culture of urban parks and converting them for new uses: the propagating frames that become benches and tables in the vegetable garden, the outdoor conservatory that houses the bar created by sculptor Simone Bellotti with pieces of wood scavenged from the gardens, what were once the gardeners’ store and work-rooms transformed into co-working spaces and classrooms for the workers’ children, the rows of plants in the old vegetable plots converted to organic growing for outdoor education activities for children and teenagers and, last but not least, the splendid conservatory with its vaulted roof next to the park building, transformed into a bistrot.

Nowadays, refurbishing a building dating from the early 1900s, and the former home of the Giardini Margherita Greenhouse keeper, requires a great respect for history combined with an urge to innovate.

This building’s emblem and symbol is its greenhouse, renovated and used as the foyer for the entire complex. A strip of cement-look stoneware tiles - “cementine” -   in various shades of grey (Block collection by Marazzi) covers and decorates the floors and walls of the areas and the visible kitchen overlooking the propagating frames.

Thanks to this project, the Giardini Margherita Greenhouses have become a platform where social innovation projects can obtain visibility and promotion, led by Kilowatt and brought to life by its community of innovators. A hub for culture, art and innovation, which encourages hybridisation and contamination between widely different people and city users.