The Parco della Pace project wins First Prize at the European Garden Award 2026.
On 26 June 2026, the European Garden Award 2026 ceremony took place at Schloss Dyck, celebrating outstanding European projects in the fields of historic gardens, contemporary park design, and climate adaptation.
Established in 2010 by the European Garden Heritage Network and the Schloss Dyck Foundation, the award has recognised around 150 winners from 23 countries for their contribution to garden culture, landscape architecture, and sustainable open-space transformation. In 2026, nine winners from seven countries were selected by the international jury from proposals submitted through an open call and from nominations made by the jury itself.
The jury—composed of Roswitha Arnold, Ed Bennis, Jacob Fischer, Davorin Gazvoda, Maren Köhler-Prehn, Mikael Löfving, Philipp Sattler, Jens Spanjer, Lieneke van Campen, and Michael Walker—awarded First Prize in the category “Climate Adaptation Measures in Parks and Gardens” to Parco della Pace in Vicenza. The laudatory speech for the project was delivered by Philipp Sattler, Managing Director of Stiftung Grüne Stadt.
In this context, Parco della Pace, designed by PAN Associati and EMF paisatge, was recognised as an exemplary transformation of a former airport into a large-scale public park. Starting from a completely flat site, the project reinterprets the rural irrigation landscape of the Vicenza area through a new system of canals, ponds, wetlands, meadows, and wooded areas.
The park actively addresses climate adaptation through nature-based solutions. It functions as a large retention basin, capable of storing and slowly releasing up to 100,000 cubic metres of water, while its layered planting strategy creates ecological niches and supports the recolonisation of the site by native fauna. The jury highlighted the strategic value of this approach, applied for the first time in Italy to a large-scale public city park, and the capacity of the project to convert a former airport and its existing buildings into a landscape for public, social, cultural, and ecological uses.
This award represents an important international recognition of the design research carried forward by PAN Associati, confirming Parco della Pace as a contemporary landscape infrastructure capable of combining environmental performance, public accessibility, ecological regeneration, and territorial identity.
