For the Winter Olympic Games 2026, BUREAU transforms the courtyard of the Centro Svizzero into Flora Alpina, an immersive alpine garden at the heart of the House of Switzerland. Conceived as a temporary garden-house, the installation combines modular structures, graphic elements and living plants to create a collective, celebratory landscape that reflects on alpine culture, shared territory and the symbolic role of flowers in sport and society.
Switzerland is imagined as a garden. If political borders define the edge of a nation, the country itself can be read as a contemporary hortus conclusus. An enclosed yet permeable landscape shaped by exchange.
Both defined and porous, the garden exists in dialogue with climate, light, and movement.
Historically conceived as a representational fragment of the world, the garden assembles living and constructed elements into precise spatial compositions, environments that frame experience while remaining open to transformation.
Beyond botanical arrangement, the garden operates as a three-dimensional spatial element. Rocks, architectural follies, and crafted artifacts punctuate its terrain, intensifying sequences and choreographing perception. As a spatial art form, it negotiates between permanence and growth, structure and seasonality, creating moments of intimacy that invite reflection while remaining embedded in the real.
It is from this conceptual ground that Flora Alpina emerges. Installed within the courtyard of the Centro Svizzero in Milano, the project reimagines the House of Switzerland as an alpine garden at the heart of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games.
The installation foregrounds alpine culture as a shared geography linking Switzerland and Italy.
A symbolic landscape that transcends borders through ecology, sport, and collective memory.
Conceived as a garden-house, the pavilion becomes a temporary civic stage over two weeks, hosting celebration, encounter, and informal gathering in the urban core. Temporality is embedded in the design logic: a flexible system of colored modular structures forms tribunes, stages, kiosks, bleachers, and market stalls. Graphic patterns unfold across surfaces, extending into lighting elements supported by Milano’s iconic street ‘panettones.’ Together, these components form a cohesive family of furniture and spatial devices that oscillate between scenography and infrastructure.
The garden extends indoors into the Swiss Corner restaurant, where a photographic installation by Dylan Perrenoud introduces archival alpine imagery through luminous lightboxes. Mysterious rock fragments and composed floral universes, drawn from a 1980s slide collection, are set in dialogue with 140 living potted flowers.
Reflections multiply within the existing architectural envelope, dissolving boundaries between interior and façade, exhibition and street.
Designed for seamless adaptability, Flora Alpina reflects on the enduring role of flowers in sport, medicine, and ritual. Both celebratory and discreet, plants become carriers of meaning, accompanying medals, victories, and shared emotion. In Milano, the alpine garden unfolds as a living landscape of encounter: open, collective, and continuously in bloom.
Plans & Sketches
Facts & Credits
Project design: BUREAU (Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Galliane Zamarbide)
Concept design: Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta
Competition: Finia Sonderegger, Valentin Racine, Beatriz Duarte, Carla Stein
Project execution: Daniel Zamarbide | Carine Pimenta (project managers), Niklas Schuknecht, Beatriz Duarte, Maria do Mar Cavaleiro
Construction supervision: Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Galliane Zamarbide, Maria do Mar Cavaleiro
Publication drawings: Yannis Tsourlos, Beatriz Duarte
Project type: Scenography and furniture design
Project location: Milano, Italy (IT)
Program: “House of Switzerland” for the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games in Milano-Cortina 2026
Area: 825 m2
Date of completion: February 2026
Photography: Dylan Perrenoud
Client: Presence Switzerland
Producer: Altofragile
Graphic design: BASE design
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