IMISP, Alumni Garden — project of L.BURO landscape studio

There’s always a chorus of voices near the fountain and in the shade of the trees. New alliances and meanings emerge in disputes. Ideas hover in the air etching into people’s souls. It’s a real present, not a snapshot from the past. A truly St. Petersburg garden on Vasilyevsky Island owned by the leading business school.

IMISP is an independent Russian business school — an educational institution founded 35 years ago, pioneering MBA business education based on the experience and traditions of Italian colleagues from Luigi Bocconi University.

The Alumni Garden is the gift that grateful alumni arranged for the business school’s anniversary.

A big thing starts small. It began with an idea, developed into a shape, and then acquired an atmosphere, mood, and aroma. The principal elements, including the sculptures, lecture area, and fountain, are placed on the central axis and surrounded by picturesque landscape paintings. A thick screen of flora screens them off from the city. These settings will make a great backdrop for photo shoots.

We installed classic larch paving on the lecture hall floor housed in the modernist glass pavilion. The paving in the courtyard follows the Italian style familiar to St. Petersburgers but is made from Karelian granite. A typical St. Petersburg garden would be impossible without sculptures, so we were creative and inventive and designed them using technical biocrete and plant spores. They will soon turn contemporary statues into moss-covered, antiquated Roman relics.

Next, we planned pleasant outdoor areas with stable plantings: there will now be a place to read alone, a cozy spot to gather in small groups, or even a place for group study sessions. The benches in the quiet areas are not to be confused with the academic benches from large university classrooms familiar to St. Petersburgers.

This garden is the case when the alma mater truly becomes a place of power to ensure that students and alumni are supported by their community and location. In this, we are helped, among other things, by preserved and reinterpreted objects — mature trees and a fountain. We will hide a message for new generations in a basin of polished black stone underwater.

Total plants 1731

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