Its characteristics

The new Park seeks to express not only an evocative poetic dimension, legitimately describable as belonging to the realm of culture - a requisite already fully met by the existing park - but also to enter into a dynamic dimension founded on interactive relations and a sense of change, thereby awakening a deep-seated desire for knowledge.

More specifically, the Park aims to communicate the following characteristics_:

ELEVATED CULTURAL LEVEL_:

Its elevated cultural level should be guaranteed first and foremost by the fact that experts of various disciplines have been called upon to take part in drawing up the grand project_; furthermore, every effort has been made to open up the executive and actualization stages of the project (in some of its parts) to the spark of inspiration coming from a wide range of artists and designers. This undertaking will be supported on a permanent basis once the Park is fully completed and functional, thanks to the continued cultural contributions of scholars, literary figures and artists, whose presence through periodic exhibitions, live performances, symposia or other live events will be an enduring feature of the life of the Park.

POETIC EVOCATION

The evocative power of the new Park derives from the desire to create a place capable of stimulating an emotive response in each one of us. The park is "poetic" because it gives free reign to the flow of memory, imagination, and communion with nature, and enhances the symbolic actualization of certain archetypal situations that otherwise lie buried in the depths of memory (loneliness, freedom, paradox, cleverness, challenge, struggle and rivalry, trust, danger).

INTERACTIVE RELATIONS

Interactiveness is an attempt to go beyond a purely poetic dimension by providing sensory stimulae as well as intellectual delights. It is in effect the endeavour to elicit an interactive response from all players in the game of finding out, while ensuring that the interactive relations are appropriately age-related.

The senses of touch, hearing, sight, smell (as well as memory and imagination) are stimulated through art, architecture, music and playing.

The Park is an invitation to discover oneself, and thus enables each individual to become a protagonist.

PATTERNS OF CHANGE

Change is one of the most vital elements needed to make the park come to life, spurring its visitors to a constant quest for discovery, today, tomorrow and for ever.

Change is expressed both spatially and temporally. In the spatial dimension, it is situations, characters and games that are subject to change, while in the realm of time change affects the very structure of the Park. The Park has been designed to allow sectional opening, a solution that is not only financially cost-saving but also makes it possible for attention to be focused on varying aspects of the Park, so that no one part is ever allowed to become a cliché_; indeed, it can truly be said that the Park itself is a board on which a game is spread out, where every move can radically change the situation.

Indeed, the Park can almost be said to be a museum undergoing continual renewal, where though something may remain to hark back to what once was - it could be a sculpture, a scenic effect - everything that surrounds it changes. Memory and patterns of change travel together through time. This is the reason why the Park is "almost" a Centre of Studies, where attention is unflaggingly devoted to the quest for the best possible tools to stimulate children's cultural awareness.