Topos 78

i n t e r n a t i o n a l

78

2012

t h e

r e v i e w

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l a n d s c a p e

a r c h i t e c t u r e

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u r b a n

d e s i g n

Culturescapes

Nordic countries Ne w Nordic C ult ure sc a pe s · Manchester Irwell Ri ver Pa rk · Innsbruck Sc ulp t ured Squa re · Copenhagen Superk ilen · Lund, Sweden M a x l a b IV L a ndsc a pe · Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg St eel Ya rd · Cape Town Fa n Wa lk · Boston Cent r a l Wh a rf Pl a z a , Boston H a rbor Pa rk Pavilion · San Francisco C a liforni a Ac a demy of Sciences · St. Petersburg, Florida Da lí Museum · Puerto Vallarta, mexico M a lecón · Singapore G a rdens by t he Bay · Essay K ien a st a nd Post modernism

c u lt u r e s c a p e s

table

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contents

Cover: Landhausplatz, Innsbruck, Austria Design: LAAC Architects, Stiefel Kramer Architecture, Christoph Grüner (artist) Photo: Günter Richard Wett

18

Gu j a d ö gg Hauk s d ó ttir

G ary r. H ild erbrand

18 New Nordic Culturescapes

74 Reciprocal Acts

Two parks for Boston’s new city fabric

New cultural buildings and landscapes in the Nordic countries

e d dy F ox , peter fin k

28 Irwell River Park

82 San Francisco’s High-Profile Living Roof

UK: the rediscovery of Manchester’s lost river

Iconic green roof at the California Academy of Sciences

The Nordic countries have seen a spate of new

jud ith Stilgenbauer

Roger Wagner

cultural buildings constructed, and new landscape spaces for public engagement accompany the architectural gestures – like Harpa, the concert hall

P E TE R Zö ch

CO N STA N CE price

36 A Sculptured Square

86 A Bunker for Salvador Dalí

Austria: Landhausplatz in Innsbruck

Hurricane-safe museum in St. Petersburg, Florida

and congress centre in Reykjavík, Iceland.

A square in the new district Belval Ouest in

91 Mosaico Vallarta, Mexico

past in the context of a quickly changing present.

Denmark: Copenhagen’s Superkilen

New Malecón with narrative paving pattern

Jenn y B. O sul d sen

47 Maxlab IV Landscape

96 Supertropical

Futuristic, scientific landscape in Sweden

Gardens by the Bay in Singapore

Multicultural issues in the 21st century city are a prime concern. Superkilen in Copenhagen is a park for

the people, all the people. Over 100 objects from 60 countries are referenced in the park – including advertising signs in Neon – in the context of a new and wild urban landscape.

74 28

Reclaiming the waterfront in Manchester, the

E ri k M einharter

102 Vocabulary for the Landscape

Square in Belval Ouest, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg

Dieter Kienast and a different kind of postmodernism

Wolfram Hö fer , V era Vicenzotti

56 Unsightly Sights to See On the transformation of old industrial sites

Currents 6 Competitions, News, Projects

bas princen ( photos)

110 Authors

Images revealing natural and artificial aspects

111 Credits/Imprint

TA M S I N Faragher

Wharf Promenade next to the Imperial War Museum

70 Walk this Way to the Time of Your Life

North establishes the southern end of the river park.

South Africa: Cape Town’s new pedestrian places

FoRM Associates

Alejandro Cartagena, West 8

the people of the city with the River Irwell. Trafford

4

A nE TTE Fre ytag

52 High-Rise and Furnace

centered design in the city.

91

BI A N CA MA R I A rinal d i

61 Reservoir

Two recent projects in Boston, USA, highlight

the necessity of civic engagement and careful context-

Irwell River Park project connects culture, history and

daniel vasini

41 Culture Riot

Reed Hilderbrand

41

j essica B ri d ger

Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg, references an industrial

Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG)

Thrainn Hauksson

52

Mexico: Puerto Vallarta’s new Malecón is a

connection between the past and present, culture and landscape, city and ocean.

5

currents

projects

projects

currents

C. F. Møller Architects and Vibeke Rønnow Landscape Architects designed the new waterfront landscape space in Aalborg, Denmark. The project was recently completed.

Reclaiming the Shore in Karlskrona, Sweden

projects

Rebuilt Market Square in Niepołomice, Poland

Åke E:son Lindman

The marketplace of Niepołomice marks the centre of this southern Polish town of approximately 10,000 inhabitants. Modest house façades frame the square, and historic buildings such as the castle and the church can be seen.

Biuro Projektów Lewicki Łatak were comissioned to redesign the place to establish new urban life. The designers’ concept was based on preserving what was not demolished and worth saving: a part of the square floor, some lampposts and benches. But they also added a unifying and internally coherent form with a new groundplane concept.

The new part of the market square groundplane was made of cobblestones all measuring 10 x 10 centimetres. The four edges of the square have distinct identities: The southern edge lies on the side of the road and is undulating, whereas the northern one is flat and a pedestrian passage without car traffic. The eastern edge of the new groundplane is parallel to the preserved walking path between the castle and the church, and the western one includes a distinct area for café tables. The geometry of the special shaping, and the new part of the market square with distinctive custom-designed lampposts, bollards, and litter bins, is closely related to its borders and the existing trees. This geometry allowed the designers to “stitch” together the new intervention and the preserved elements.

Lights and benches, and a consistent paving pattern, knit together the marketplace of Niepołomice in sothern Poland in this project by Biuro Projektów Lewicki Łatak.

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cabana beach promenades in Rio de Janeiro by Roberto Burle Marx.

Adjacent to the promenade, densely planted flower gardens are calm recreational spaces, which have been sunken 60 centimetres to shield against the winds of the fjord.

Along the waterfront, there are plenty of facilities for both children and young people, like a play park with soft, curved grass mounds, rubber banks, and play components.

At the eastern end of the promenade, framing the new exhibition centre named the Utzon Centre, the surrounding park is furnished by Jørn Utzon, architect of the Sydney Opera.

The redesigned waterfront has already become Aalborg’s “urban garden.”

The maritime context is reflected in the materials used in the design and in elements that connect people to the waterside.

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visitors from the seashore.

The design team created a plaza with a clean design to avoid competing with the splendid views of the archipelago. A horizontal granite surface is edged with an Lshaped wooden deck that hangs out over the water. The plaza now offers seating, trees, and secluded corners, as well as Pål Svensson’s granite-and-glass sculpture Doldrums.

Kasper Dudzik

stretch of quayside became a tree-lined boulevard for ­cyclists and pedestrians.

The harbour promenade has steps and recessed terraces, allowing people to get close to the water. Various kinds of urban gardens facilitate different activities such as markets, ball games, and sun-bathing. For example, the central activities field offers beach-volleyball fields in the summer and an ice skating rink in the winter, surrounded by netting and lighting masts. C. F. Møller and Vibeke Rønnow chose materials appropriate in the maritime context, including asphalt, rubber, Corten steel, concrete, and wood. Wavy pavement patterns are subtle references to the sea, and reference the design of the Copa-

Helene Hoyer Mikkelsen (3)

Aalborg, a city in the northern part of Denmark, is located adjacent to the Limfjord, which is connected to the ­Baltic Sea. Recently, a master plan for Aalborg’s waterfront has been realised, designed by C. F. Møller Architects and Vibeke Rønnow Landscape Architects (which has been a part of C. F. Møller Architects since 2008).

The master plan envisioned linking the city’s medieval centre with the water, which had become disconnected due to the industrial harbour and the associated heavy traffic.

The planners linked the urban fabric with the fjord’s edge, and transformed the former back side of Aalborg into a new front for the city. The approximately one-kilometre

Vibeke Rønnow, C. F. Møller Architects

Biuro Projektów Lewicki Łatak

Aalborg’s New Waterfront

The city of Karlskrona, located in southern Sweden, is surrounded by the water of the Baltic sea. Dating back to the 17th century, Karlskrona originally was established on more than 30 islands, and it was designed as a naval base.

Today it is a Unesco World Heritage site. In spite of the city’s proximity to the water and its dependence on it, the seaside qualities are underrecognized.

In order to revitalize the urban contact with the water and encourage urban life at Karlskrona’s waterfront, a fairly small landscape intervention was initiated last year. Landscape architect Thorbjörn Andersson, from the engineering and design firm Sweco Architects, and artist Pål Svensson redesigned the Fisktorget, a plaza facing the sea, which has traditionally been the market place for selling fish. Since the market hall on Fisktorget was torn down in the 1960s, the plaza has acted as a barrier, separating residents and

Thorbjörn Andersson of Sweco Architects and artist Pål Svensson designed this project to connect the city to the water in Karlskrona.

Reykjavík’s new concert hall and congress center is named Harpa (harp). It is situated on a landfill at the harbor. Gangways lead across the water in reference to the old piers.

Squares to the south and southwest of the building can be used for outdoor events such as concerts.

T

he last few years have presented an unusual number of big cultural buildings in each and every one of the Nordic countries: the Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Center in Iceland, the Musiikkitalo in Finland, the National Opera and Ballet in Norway, the Royal Danish Theatre or Skuespilshuset in Denmark, the Malmö Cultural Centre in Sweden and the National Gallery of Art in Greenland. Each has been given a pivotal, prestigious site and is expected to have a signature architectural character that will attract large scale international attention and publicity, prime currency in these times of cultural market­ing and tourism.

The strategy of using iconic buildings to define and shape the public realm is ancient.

Monumental architecture has, throughout history, been used to express political power

and exert influence. More recently, the use of architectural masterpieces to regenerate the public realm and give it cultural value have been epitomized by Bilbao and Sydney. But one can have doubts about the calculated effect of such architectural masterpieces and their desireability in democratic societies.

They put a massive responsibility on governments and architects to use the resources dedi­cated to such projects strategically in both ­financial and social terms.

The new cultural buildings described here do not rely on big name foreign architects but have been developed by respected Nordic design offices that are generally known for their more humble or downsized approach that draws strong relationships to the surrounding nature and provides informal, amenable public spaces rather than “sophisticated“ urban

Guja Dögg Hauksdóttir

NEW NORDIC CULTURESCAPES

Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Center, Reykjavík, Iceland Architects: Henning Larsen Architects, Batteríið Architects; artist: Ólafur Elíasson Landscape architects: Landslag, in cooperation with Batteríið Architects Area: 28,000 square metres; main hall 1,800 seats, additional three halls 195 – 750 pers.

Completion: 2011

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In northern societies culture plays an important role. Most recently, concert halls and theatres have been developed at the best inner-city locations in all capitals. They act as magnets for public life and are promoted by modest but highly functional open spaces.

Peter ZĂśch

A sculptured square 36

Innsbruck’s newly designed Landhausplatz in the Tyrolean Alps of Austria, has swiftly become a vibrant and popular place in the city. The sinuous topography and light surface create a homogenous space which is structured into distinct areas and accommodates four memorials.

37

Bianca Maria Rinaldi

Super tropical Gardens by the Bay is the largest landscape architecture project in Singapore’s history. Innovative elements are combined with lush tropical vegetation in the first of three parks.

At the turn of this century, the populous metropolises of Far East Asia began to reconsider their model of development, which until then was based on rapid urban growth indifferent to both morphological and landscape peculiarities and to the historical matrix of their sites. The result of this growth was increasingly homogeneous and banal ­ cityscapes. As an antidote to this trend, some megacities executed functional reconversion projects transforming central areas into entirely new “natural” sites. These projects, in which landscape architecture played a major role, reflected a strategy of reconstructing an original identity that had been lost. The final goal of the massive interventions went beyond simple urban requalification: in a market where big cities compete to become financial, commercial, or transport hubs, an ambitious metropolis needs a winning image.

This use of landscape architecture as a territorial marketing tool began with Seoul’s revival of the Cheonggyecheon, a river that originally ran through the city but had since been covered over (see Topos 55). The removal of an elevated highway made a linear park possible, a creation evoking the atmosphere of historical Seoul midst the city’s high-rises, bringing to the heart of the metropolis a fluvial landscape of antique memory.

Thus Seoul recovered its identity as an ancient city. Singapore, on the other hand, lacks the ancient and prestigious past of the South Korean capital. But it has found a way to recast its image as a megacity of the

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