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2024

MCHAP

Parque Bicentenario de Miraflores

Paisaje Vivo SA

Lima, Miraflores, Peru

November 2022

PRIMARY AUTHOR

Eileen Dancuart (Landscape Architecture)

CONTRIBUTING AUTHOR

Luis Enrique Bendezú Velarde (Civil and Structural Engeneering)

CLIENT

Luis Alfonso Molina Arles - Miraflores Mayor 2019-2022

PHOTOGRAPHER

Manuel J. Gallegos de la Piniella

OBJECTIVE

• The project goals include social inclusion, security, landscaping and plant education. The Park creates public space accessible to all, which allows moments of recreation and enjoyment of nature, beneficial for people's physical and mental health. In addition, the park stabilizes the cliff with a terrace system, avoiding soil erosion and the sliding of stones, which frequently occurs in other areas of the embankment, reinforcing the land through geocells and finding plants to fix the visual impact of a hard intervention.
• The landscaping of the park highlights the diversity of flora and fauna in the region and educates visitors on the environmental benefits of each of the plants and how this plurality contributes to the conservation of pollinators. The material selection is based are easy to maintain: concrete path textures, concrete benches, wooden shade structures and stainless-steel railing easy to lean on.
• The intervention of the site has layers to consider:
o Slope analysis
o Existing trees inventory and levels to be respected
o Creating levels for circulation, a topography of accessible paths and platforms for contemplation. The geometry of the site takes a simple concept: the diagonal line, both of the terrain and of the broken line of a path, as an experience of discovery.
o Sculpting the land, analyzing the resulting slopes for planting
o Deciding where and what to plant on each particular land shape, adding a wide variety of new trees
o Completing the tapestry with lower plants, creating a place to learn and contemplate.

CONTEXT

The city of Lima is a big metropolis with more than 10 million inhabitants, located in front of the Pacific Ocean on a plateau of the Peruvian desert coast. The city border is composed by high rise buildings and a recently new sequence of public parks.
The Bicentennial Park of Miraflores is conceived as a place to foster diversity through plant contemplation, as a celebration of 200 years of Independence of Peru. The Miraflores Bicentennial Park, with 30,400 square meters (7.5 acres) is a new park of Miraflores on the Armendariz ravine close to Barranco. It was part of a political campaign of the former city mayor, Luis Molina. It is one of the few public space projects that invited a landscape architect to conceive and design it. The project continued despite some political opposition and to the pandemic, and was inaugurated in November 2022.
The site was difficult to intervene because of the nature of the sloped terrain, a narrow site tight by high-speed highways, the need to stabilize the ravine, the goal of planting a wide variety of plants that could resist high salinity and poor soils, and the importance of maintaining all of the existing trees. Among all the difficulties, the potential of the site was huge, due to its location in front of the ocean where sunsets can be seen from above, and as a possibility of becoming an emblematic work of Peruvian landscaping in Miraflores, the most visited district in the country.

PERFORMANCE

The site is a postcard. It is a postcard of a city on a desert plateau in front of the ocean, a place where culture and nature coexist, a site where architecture and landscape meet, a path where citizens become tourists, a viewpoint where visitors become dwellers of a world without frontiers.
The Park has turned into a refuge, a place of peace, of connection with nature, a garden close to the ocean. Wild life is present, and nature keeps transforming and bringing sensibility and wonder. The Park stars to erase frontiers, to make connections, from Miraflores to Lima, to America, to the planet, as a common and beautiful place to live.
New projects are coming after the Bicentennial Park, as a pedestrian Bridge that will connect the ravine from Miraflores to Barranco.
This Bicentennial Park has created a better understanding of the participation of professionals on the public sector, raising the value of landscape architecture and the role of interaction among multidisciplinary disciplines, a conquer of our professions in the public sphere.

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