BAM - Biblioteca degli Alberi Milano

This guide to the Biblioteca degli Alberi in Milan starts with what this ground behind the rail yards was for decades after the Second World War: a bare, polluted brownfield used for dumped building materials and a traveling circus. It follows Dutch landscape architect Petra Blaisse, who won an international competition in 2004 with an idea nobody had tried here, organizing a public park like a library, with each tree species gathered into its own circular grove instead of a shelf. Look for the twenty-two groves as you walk between them, and notice that Blaisse insisted her library of trees have no gates and no closing time.