Slovenia's award winning Koper Central Park
Koper Central Park, Slovenia’s award-winning Enota development, fuses a city beach and city park to encourage visitors to use the space in a variety of ways.
The three million euro, 26,000 square-metre park won a World Architecture Festival 2021 award in the landscape-nature context category, and was also a 2019 Architecture Masterprize winner.
Koper Central Park fuses a city beach and city park.
Set between Piransanka Road and the Semedela promenade, and between the Grande canal and the area beyond the city market, Koper Central Park rests on the site of a former salt pond. The area was gradually filled in as the city evolved in past decades, and Enota recognised the development potential in the recovered land.
“The new intervention offers a uniform and attractive appearance, and with its intensive hinterland greenery, it drowns the heterogeneity of the surrounding built structures,” say the designers. “The fusing of the elements of a city beach and a contemporary city park encourages the area’s residents and visitors to use the space in different ways.”
Koper Central Park features organically designed urban elements: stands for viewers, an obstacle course for children, climbing walls, a playground and concert venue. The basic building blocks of the park are undulating and monolithic, and the layout of its green surfaces divides the space into individual programme isles.
The park’s proximity to the sea allows programme zones water elements. A pond, ground sprinklers, geyser, parabolic water jets, cascades, and water platform all encourage active use of the space and expansion of the future beach towards the interior of the park.
Koper Central Park doesn’t feature traditional footpaths in order to encourage diversity of use. Visitors can create their own path, and the paving enables rearrangement of the compacted surfaces at a later time. Interlocking paving with a free arrangement of grass-coloured tiles is limited to the park’s access points, as well sections where more intensive use of the ground is expected.
The Enota development has won a number of awards.
Spicy Garden was involved in the landscape design of the project. The planted portion of the park features solely indigenous Mediterranean vegetation, strategically arranged for tall growth. Existing tree lanes on both edges of the park give shade to programme zones and protect it from the impacts of its surroundings.
“The innovative layout of the city park is a great new asset for the citizens of Koper as it enables the development of programmes which the city presently cannot offer,” say Enota. “The new park is an attraction and with its unique form and the manner of spatial organisation, it transcends a merely functional park regulation. It represents a prototype for further designing of the wider area, as well as motivation for development-oriented attitudes in regard to other sections of the Slovene seacoast currently in a state of decay.”
