Just like Azabudai Hills. Nestled in the heart of the Minato district, this newly inaugurated area spans over 8 hectares, offering a serene escape from the hustle and bustle of urban life. Here, amidst vast green expanses teeming with trees, flowers, and tranquil water features, lies a true garden-city.

Built where once stood a temple and a large park, and where daily business of florists and launderers took place, the project by Heatherwick Studio has radically changed its appearance into one of the greenest areas of the city, carefully preserving its original character. Futuristic structural forms have become the “network” that embraces residential buildings and commercial spaces, temples, art galleries, and restaurants, to recall in a contemporary key the typical architectural congestion of Tokyo, where old and new, large and small architectures are stacked against each other.

ph. © Paola Lenti srl

The ambition of the project, lasting over thirty years, was to create a public space meant to be “lived” and to succeed in involving and retaining the community that has always inhabited the neighborhood. Once the works were completed, almost all of the previous inhabitants and businesses chose to return and populate this extraordinary “three-dimensional landscape”, which has succeeded in adding something fresh and welcoming to the modern urban fabric, too often impersonal, of a big metropolis.

Right opposite the green and sustainable area of Azabudai Hills, Paola Lenti Tokyo flagship finds its new home, transitioning from the residential district of Hiroo. In partnership with Atlantic Cars Ltd., the store seamlessly integrates into the Japanese culture, reflecting the brand’s commitment to aesthetics and craftsmanship. Designed to collaborate closely with architects and interior designers, the space invites creative exploration and bespoke solutions.

The neutral tones chosen for the walls and flooring enhance those bold shades that have always been a distinctive element of the Paola Lenti collections: the green and turquoise of the lava and glass surfaces, the solar yellow and deep red of the coverings, the vibrant pink and the decided purplish blue of the weaves.

ph. © Creare Co., Ltd.

L'articolo The Garden-City of Azabudai Hills proviene da Paola Lenti.

Be responsible. Do not waste. Reuse. Find a way to give new life to thousands of offcuts, fabric and cord remnants, selvages, processing leftovers. A multicolored wealth of yarns and materials that are still performing – still alive – normally destined for landfills. What to do with it? Paola Lenti began to ask herself the question a few years ago, while pondering over the profound meaning of sustainability, a term now overused. How can we be sustainable, this was the exact question, when every year we produce more than 10 tons of leftovers, the disposal of which requires energy, people, machinery? Furthermore, why define them as waste or treat them as such, when they could turn into something unexpected?

Following the thread of this thought, Paola Lenti metaphorically began to fill drawers: in practice, dozens of boxes of different materials meticulously catalogued by color, type of fabric, size. A memory archive, a piece of company history.

In order for that thought to take shape, however, a new sign was needed, capable of revealing the essence of the material by changing – somehow shaking up – its original appearance. Brazilian brothers Fernando and Humberto Campana, renowned all over the world for their iconic pieces produced with waste materials, could have been the ideal partners.
Different in style – nonconformists, out-of-the-box -, but at the same time close to Paola Lenti for the philosophy that has guided their design career: the urgency of identifying a way of producing that combines ethics and aesthetics, the importance of creating from existing materials. Furthermore, the common sensibility for colour, more instinctive in the case of Campana, the result of a long chromatic research for Paola Lenti. Finally – no less pivotal – a shared vision of social responsibility: the awareness that there can be no ethics without inclusion and that, therefore, it is necessary to look for talents even among disadvantaged people; give them the deserved value, make them flourish. So that talent is not wasted either.

Paola Lenti sent to Brazil boxes full of textile remnants to explain to the brothers Campana the potentialities of this project. The answer: “This is a treasure”. A series of remote meetings led to the partnership. Humberto Campana designed shapes and volumes of the first prototypes; Paola Lenti shared her knowledge of the materials and her innate sense of colour, the brand hallmark. A team of artisans in the Meda factory got to work to bring the two thoughts together.

Test after test, matter regenerated and acquired a new form. Rope, Paola Lenti first high tech yarn for the outdoors, revealed the versatility of polypropylene, the material, of which it is composed. Naturally opening up, Rope cords have brought to life “flowers”, as soft as puffs in infinite shades, and expanses of “seaweeds”, silky to the touch, with which seats have been covered, inviting you to rest and play. With other fabric remnants, a rug has been designed with a patchwork effect; with still others the soft tubulars, similar to tentacles, which serve as backrests. The products finished, Humberto Campana commented:

Metamorfosi, this is the name of the new collection designed by Campana, draws inspiration from the natural world and its mutations. Morpho, Centopeia, Alicia, are organisms inhabiting our earth and our seas. The observer, though, is free to interpret appearance and shapes. The border with a work of art is very thin: they are unique pieces that arouse wonder.

Victoria and Saly Samba have been involved in the production of the prototypes from the social tailor’s shop CouLture Migrante in Como that uses itself discontinued fabrics for its products and offers job opportunities to migrant men and women at risk of social exclusion. This is the sign that includes: the people, Paola Lenti and Campana ideas. And all comes full circle.

L'articolo The seduction of Metamorphosis proviene da Paola Lenti.

In the book Pianeta Oceano, biologist Mariasole Bianco describes an extraordinary ecosystem and discloses some surprising information: if it were not for the ocean, the temperature of the earth would have increased 36 degrees from the industrial revolution to the present day; 50% of the oxygen that we breathe is derived from the ocean, which is also able to absorb one third of the carbon dioxide that we produce every day. Who would have thought: a whale, during its lifetime, stores on average 33 tons of CO₂, while a tree annually absorbs less than 22 kilos. The great mammal generally feeds at the depths of the ocean, but it defecates on the surface, releasing iron and nitrogen, elements which are capable of fertilizing phytoplankton. And it is specifically phytoplankton that plays a key role in climate regulation because it, in turn, absorbs carbon dioxide and, at the end of its life cycle, it sinks into the depths, stockpiling the carbon.

In general, the ocean thus could be called the blue lung of the world. This is also thanks to its vegetation of submerged green expanses and algae. For example, Posidonia beds: in the Mediterranean, they are one of the greatest sites of biodiversity and, trapping sediments among their roots, they purify the water and fight coastal erosion.

Mangroves, along the equator, are also an ideal environment for the reproduction of millions of species, and they represent a natural barrier against coastal erosion, storm surges and rising sea levels.

What is more: have you ever heard about forests of kelp? They are brown algae, of medium and large size, capable of growing to a height of 45 meters, equivalent to at least a ten-story building: they welcome sea otters and an extremely rich ecosystem, offsetting the carbon dioxide emitted by 6 million automobiles.

L'articolo Blue Planet proviene da Paola Lenti.

In his last book, La Pianta del mondo (Editori Laterza), scientist Stefano Mancuso recalls how plants play a fundamental role in regulating climate and in the absorption of carbon dioxide, and how, while representing 85% of living organisms on planet earth, they have often been sidelined. And yet they constitute the nervous system on which the entire world in which we live is constructed, and many, so many stories begin precisely with one of them. Stories of ideals and freedom, of progress and science. But also of unparalleled notes.

The trees of music? They are red spruce.

A Stradivarius soundboard can be made only with red spruce. The famous Italian luthier built 14 violas and violins, starting with a single model. It seems that the perfect conduction of sound in this plant is due to the resiniferous micro-channels that run all along its trunk. There is more: a good tonewood requires trees with a diameter of at least sixty centimeters (between one hundred fifty and two hundred years old), and with the correct density, a characteristic obtained only through slow growth, under stabile climatic conditions at a certain altitude.

Not coincidentally, one of the secrets of great eighteenth-century violin making would seem to reside precisely in the especially slow growth of spruce trees, due to the so-called Little Ice Age, which occurred between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Music today has changed. There is the sound of the wind that, with rising temperatures, has struck down thousands of spruce trees. The 2018 storm in Trentino also damaged the forest from which wood for musical instruments has always been obtained. Not that spruce is the only wood used to build a violin. Mancuso enumerates sycamore maple, ebony, rosewood and boxwood. But he specifies: it is only from spruce that a divine sound can emerge. Anyone who has tried to play a Stradivarius knows this.

L'articolo Lymph & sounds proviene da Paola Lenti.

The European Court of Auditors emphasizes how not enough is being done to combat and reverse the inexorable process of soil degradation tied to the exploitation of land and climate change. Reforestation and regenerative agriculture could make a decisive contribution. In fact, while intensive agriculture subjects the land to stress, through unsustainable chemical and mechanical processes that, in the long run, will render the soil completely sterile, the regenerative approach contributes to the reconstitution of natural cycles, improving productivity and the quality of life of farmers and animals, with a return to the well being of communities.

Daniele Cesano, a Piedmontese engineer, well established in Brazil, bears witness to this. There he has developed his Intelligent and Sustainable Smart Agro-climatic Module (MAIS), a syntropic approach capable of giving resilience and restoring fertility to lands cultivated and/or used for farming.

“In the last one hundred years agriculture has always extracted more than it has restored and with deforestation and monocultures it has fundamentally undermined the natural cycles – Cesano explains. Today syntropic processes are helping us return these cycles to an optimal energy level in order to guarantee the regeneration of the soil and its return to productivity.” All in accordance with laws established by Mother Nature.

No longer monocultures and fertilization, but layers of different plants with different functions. We start with grasses and shrubs that need little to live and grow; and from leguminous plants, “pioneers” that harbor among their roots certain batteries capable of capturing nitrogen and transforming it into substances that can be assimilated by other plant organisms. Plants succeed one another in time and space, as long as there is cooperation, and usually within a few years yield appreciable results, not only in terms of food production, but also renewed biodiversity. The beauty of this model is that it can be exported everywhere, including to Europe.

The images show farmland on the Brazilian plantation Mata do Lobo, near the city of Rio Verde, in the state of Goiàs, in the Cerrado biome. The activity of agricultural enterprises has always been the monocultural production of grains for multinationals, but given the decrease in productivity and profits, Maria Vitoria Vasconcelos and her husband have found a valid alternative in syntropic agriculture, leading to economic and intellectual independence. Today the principal crops are coffee, bananas and Australian red cedar; but there are also many other trees, for example Eucalyptus, Mango, Janbolan, as well as various indigenous species.

Sources: news.un.org; wisesociety.it, italianeconlavaligia.com, op.europa.eu, corriere.it

L'articolo Harmony and Syntropy<br> Agriculture that regenerates proviene da Paola Lenti.

In the garden, especially in my garden, we welcome emotions, exaggerations, endeavours, spirited life, fears, hopes, joy, surprise – the unexpected thus becomes part of everyday life. Welcome to my tiny meadows of spontaneous snowdrops, grown by themselves without obvious composition, and year after year, bloom after bloom, gift us with the most beautiful and repeated joy.

And how would you consider the small “natural” forest of Dove-trees that sprung up near the now-adult trees close to the stream , or the many Cornus kousa that have grown a little almost everywhere in the garden? Just as the tiny, scented, and robust Daphne boula plants, them sown and grown without human interference. All together they give us the theoretic certainty of continuity. A future full of life, an easy and natural becoming.

When the garden lives naturally, growing out of harm’s way, rejuvenating itself, it can become a resilient entity, independent from man, that will face difficulties like diseases with great confidence: The important thing is to grow a robust garden in which hope becomes certainty and the future, whether it rains or not, whether there be frost or not, or whether there be there be fungus or grasshoppers, it will be happy, serene and peaceful.

A pair of sharp shears to cut off withered flowers or revive tired shapes, a little of the spade and hoe to push back invading weeds (always lurking), and a rake to create some rich and intelligent mulching, are the primary tools for a garden that grows independently and “spontaneously”.

This is a welcoming garden, a safe home for small creatures that can live and grow there: lizards and salamanders, birds and toads, hedgehogs, and tiny country mice. It is a welcoming and lush garden, with a diverse circle of friends, who are genuine and spirited travel companions. Great and lasting benefits will come from not having abused our microcosm with treatments and poisons and not having suffocated her with anxious and dangerous cures. The fact that it is intensely inhabited is the right reward – a garden is not only a place for plants.

 From:

Paolo Pejrone, Un giardino semplice. Storie di felici accoglienze e armoniose convivenze, Einaudi, 2016.

L'articolo A simple garden proviene da Paola Lenti.

Founded by David Kratz with the idea of transforming plastic into an opportunity for many poor coastal communities in countries such as Haiti, The Philippines and Brazil. Plastic waste gathered by the locals is exchanged at collection points for basic goods and services that improve the quality of life of the people and generates economic growth and a better future. 

Where does this waste go? The plastic is purchased as ‘social’ plastic and transformed into ecological fibre and is certified by the EU Ecolabel, which is a label of environmental excellence where products are traceable and have a positive impact.

This is how AERELLE® Blue was born, the ecological cushioning made from recycled and recyclable polyester fiber produced by ADVANSA with materials supplied by Plastic Bank. Today AERELLE is an essential part of all Paola Lenti’s seats and cushions, both indoors and outdoors.

It is a material that is invisible to the eye but essential for comfort and function, as well as conveying a contemporary design philosophy, where aesthetics is also an ethical question.

L'articolo The virtuous circle proviene da Paola Lenti.