Piazza San Lorenzo in Pistoia by MICROSCAPE reclaims a parking-dominated historic square as a continuous civic ground, using stone paving, structured planting, water management, lighting, and accessible seating to reconnect three religious frontages with everyday public life.
Piazza San Lorenzo in Pistoia Technical Information
- ArchitectsMICROSCAPE architecture urban design AA
- LocationPiazza San Lorenzo, Pistoia, Italy
- Gross Area6,665 m2 | 71,741 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years2022 – 2026
- Photographs© Filippo Poli
We designed the urban space with the aim of creating a domestic public space so that it would become the garden of the city.
– MICROSCAPE architecture urban design AA
Reframing a Historic Urban Basin
The redevelopment of Piazza San Lorenzo begins with a simple urban reading: the square is not treated as a residual void between buildings, but as a single civic basin defined by three religious frontages. The Conventual Church of San Lorenzo, the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, and the Oratory of Sant’Ansano establish a staggered scenic edge, giving the space an unusual depth. Rather than isolating these monuments as discrete objects, the project organizes the ground plane to make their relative positions legible.
This strategy depends on the recovery of surface from vehicular use. The eastern road edge has been narrowed and cleared of parking, allowing the adjacent facades to participate again in the public life of the square. To the north, resident parking remains, but its margins are redrawn with trees, planting, and graphic bands that temper the infrastructural character of the area. The project therefore avoids a complete erasure of contemporary urban needs, instead recalibrating their spatial presence.
The resulting plan clarifies pedestrian movement through long views, thresholds, and lateral sequences. The square is no longer experienced only as an open expanse in front of San Lorenzo, but as a field of relations between monuments, minor urban fabric, planted rooms, and retained circulation. This reading is especially clear from above, where the project appears less as a singular plaza composition than as a set of porous civic territories held together by a continuous ground.
Stone, Memory, and the Continuity of the Ground
The use of Firenzuola stone gives the project its principal urban instrument. Laid as a pale gray surface across the square, the paving visually connects the three churchyards and pedestrian areas into one civic field. Its reflective quality changes with light and weather, allowing the monumental facades to stand out without the need for excessive formal gestures in the paving pattern itself.
Material variation is handled through finish rather than fragmentation. Diamond saw-cut stone defines the broad field, brushed surfaces frame linear lighting elements, and striped textures mark specific areas, including the zone south of the intersection with Via del Ceppo. These shifts register circulation and occupation while maintaining the continuity of the basin. The ground performs as both surface and guide, balancing abstraction with pragmatic articulation.
Travertine elements introduce a slower and more tactile register. Curved seats define a circular space around the skylight of the Pistoia Underground route, forming a small square within the larger square, while monolithic benches mark the junction between new stone paving and the historic terracotta surface of the San Lorenzo churchyard. These insertions do not imitate the older fabric. They establish measured contact points where new public use, archaeological memory, and inherited material textures can coexist.
Planting as Urban Structure
The planting strategy is central to the transformation of Piazza San Lorenzo from a paved void into a garden-based civic landscape. Rows of trees, shrub beds, and perennial bands organize the open surface into smaller zones for sitting, crossing, waiting, and informal gathering. The square remains legible as a whole, but its scale is moderated by planted thresholds and shaded edges.
The composition refers to Pistoia’s long association with nursery cultivation. Shrubs and perennials are arranged in thematic bands, while the staggered planting pattern introduces visual movement without undermining the clarity of the plan. Tree species including field maple, ginkgo, tulip tree, ash, and ornamental apple create different seasonal and chromatic effects. Because many of the trees are young, the current spatial condition is provisional. The project asks to be read as an evolving landscape whose architectural definition will strengthen as canopies mature.
Environmental performance is embedded in this landscape structure. The planted areas increase permeability beyond the previous condition, while the rows of trees introduce future shade across pedestrian routes and seating areas. Rainwater is collected through linear channels integrated into the paving and stored in underground tanks for irrigation reuse. In this sense, the garden is not only representational or nostalgic. It mediates heat, drainage, maintenance, and comfort within the constraints of a historic urban center.
Light, Accessibility, and Everyday Use
The lighting design extends the spatial reading of the square into evening hours. General illumination is combined with facade lighting for the three historic elevations, whose staggered positions are reinforced through controlled differences in intensity and white temperature between 2700K and 4000K. The effect is not a uniform wash, but a calibration of depth across the architectural backdrop.
Linear floor lights, illuminated benches, and angular lighting poles contribute to this nocturnal structure. By day, the poles read as contemporary vertical elements among trees and stone facades. At dusk, they become part of a layered system in which circulation, seating, planting, and monument are all visible without being reduced to a single lighting hierarchy. The best condition of the square may be this intermediate period, when the mineral plane, vegetation, and historic fronts remain equally active.
Everyday use is supported through accessible surfaces, distributed seating, and varied spatial scales. Linear benches define social edges along planted beds, while travertine seats offer more monumental pauses at thresholds and focal points. The absence of architectural barriers allows movement across the square for users with different mobility conditions, and the arrangement of small gathering areas avoids concentrating public life in one central zone. The square becomes civic not through emptiness, but through the accumulation of ordinary activities across a legible and shared ground.
About MICROSCAPE architecture urban design AA
MICROSCAPE architecture urban design AA is an Italian architecture and urban design practice based in Lucca, Italy. Founded in Lucca in 2006 by siblings Patrizia Pisaniello and Saverio Pisaniello, the studio works across architectural and urban design scales, with research and professional practice focused on the relationship between nature and construction, particularly in collective public spaces.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Landscape designers: MICROSCAPE architecture urban design AA
- Client: Municipality of Pistoia
- Construction company: Balestri Costruzioni srl
- Other contributors: Architectural design, lighting design, CSP, and project management by MICROSCAPE architecture urban design AA; consultant: Archimede srl; street furniture supplier: Metalco srl; lighting suppliers: Artemide srl, iGuzzini srl, Simes srl; irrigation supplier: Irritec spa; flooring supplier: Cave di Firenzuola srl; green supplier: Mati srl; photography: Filippo Poli
