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Plants and Design. Designing with plants is an obvious activity for gardeners and landscape architects. Plants as building materials for all occasions are sometimes appreciative and straightforward companions of architecture. At times, however, they may also be prima donnas that require an extreme amount of attention if they are to show off their charms or even their capacity to function. And yet, most of the time this capriciousness is not the fault of the plant but of the unfavourable circumstances in which it grows. The adverse conditions of urban environments force designers to summon up all their skills if they are to bring an idea to fruition, to accurately use plants according to their habitus and character. This is the actual theme of this issue, in which we present masterful examples of plant usage.

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Plants and Design

Michael Arad, PWP Landscape Architecture 9 /11 Memori a l, Ne w York · Thorbjörn Andersson H y llie Squa re, M a lmö · TCL N at ion a l A rbore t um, C a nberr a · Talley Associates Perot Museum, Da ll a s · John McAslan + Partners Sta nisl avsk y fac tory, Moscow · Boeri Studio Vertic a l Forest, Mil a n · OJB Sunny l a nds Center a nd G a rdens, C a liforni a · Gustafson Porter Me z ya d Desert Pa rk , A bu Dh a bi · atelier le balto LuFo PARK , A achen · Noël Kingsbury T rends in Pl a nting Design · James Hitchmough, Nigel Dunnett Pl a nting st r ategy in t he Olympic Pa rk , London

Plants and Design ISBN 978-3-7667-2073-3

2013

2013

plants

and

design

table

of

contents

Cover: Ice structures and leaves, lily pond Photo: Ottomar Lang

ale x ulam

16 World Trade Center Memorial A field of swamp white oaks for the 9/11 Memorial in ­

72 Design and Planting Strategy in the

Olympic Park, London

New York

Flowering meadows around the Olympic sports facilities

of the new Arboretum in Canberra, emerging after a

A nde r s K ling

period of devastating fires.

22 Hyllie Square

78 The Necessity of Constraints

A plaza of beech trees for a suburb of Malmö, Sweden

Connecting built forms and nature

“100 Forests and 100 Gardens” is the theme

Nigel Dunnet

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James H itchmough, N igel D unnett

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Large-scale planting creates the identity of the

Gini L ee

26 Forest, Garden, and Pleasure Ground for ­ the New Century

Fr eder ick Steiner

Claudia Moll

84 Nature in the City Reloaded Native gravel landscape roof in Zurich, Switzerland

National Arboretum in Canberra, Australia

Olympic Park in London. In July blue and yellow native

and non-native species flower around the stadium.

C athe r ine Gavin

D ietmar Str aub

88 Folly Forest in Winnipeg

32 Built Landscape for the Perot Museum

of Nature and Science in Dallas

Low-budget landscape architecture greening a school yard

Roof with a Texan landscape miniature

Br igitte Fr anzen

92 Garden in Progress

J ay M e r r ick

37 Stanislavsky Creates New Method

Paul Bardagjy

The freshwater mangroves of the U Minh forest are important for the ecology of the

Ca Mau peninsula, Vietnam. A research projects deals with the urban future of the peninsula.

43 A Vertical Forest in Milan

Green high-rise buildings in the centre of the Italian ­

Embedding the city into environmental systems

M elanie M ü lle r - B oscaro

metropolis

merges with the prairie landscape. It is an example of

48 Deep Collaboration between

Design and Land

how to connect built forms and nature.

The gardens of Sunnylands Center in California

78 The former Stanislavsky factory in Moscow

provides a series of squares and gardens. At Theatre

Edgeland House at the fringe of Austin, Texas,

Bonnie G r ant, Sar ah H icks

96 Grafting the Australian Landscape into

an Urban Framework

Rachel B e r ney

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International Art in Aachen, Germany

Gardens and squares for a former factory in Moscow

Mette Kleppe John Gollings

100

Transformation of the garden of the Ludwig Forum for

Br uno D e Meulder , Kelly Shannon

100 From Planning to Planting

Afforestation in Ca Mau Peninsula, Vietnam

Square birches stand in a wooden plateau.

J ennife r M ui

53 Mezyad Desert Park Regeneration of a desert landscape in Abu Dhabi

ottoma r lang ( photos)

59 Hidden Art from the Lily Pond

Currents 6 Projects, News, Personalities 108 Commentary

110 Authors

Natural structures and their multiplicity of forms

111 Credits/Imprint

No ë l K ingsbu ry

Hufton+Crow

Dietmar Straub

66 Trends in Planting Design

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Focusing on artificial ecosystems

The grey yard at a school in Winnipeg, Canada,

was converted into a green yard with trees growing in openings made in the 50-year-old tarmac.

5

currents

projects

projects

news

currents

news

Skrudur is a vegetable garden in the far north of Iceland, just a few

Hervé Brunon

kilometres from the Arctic Circle.

Memorial to Victims of Violence in Mexico

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Carlo Scarpa Prize 2013 to Skrudur, Iceland

For the Memorial to Victims of Violence in Mexico, Gaeta-Springall Arquitectos suggested seventy corten steel walls to rise between the trees in Chapultepec Park. A 1,200 square metre fountain forms the central space.

Thomas Balsley Associates along with McKnight Associates are putting the finishing touches on a new landmark project for the city of Cleveland, Ohio. Perk Park, a green space in the middle of downtown, transforms a long-­ neglected corner of modernist architect I.M. Pei’s historic 1960 master plan into a lively, welcoming urban environment for the 21st century.

Named after former Cleveland Mayor Ralph Perk, the park is located at East 12th Street and Chester Avenue, on one of several downtown parcels bulldozed decades ago as part of Pei’s urban renewal scheme. The first park on the site was completed in 1972: a New Brutalist ensemble of heavy concrete planters surrounding a sunken plaza. The old park quickly became a

Lisa DeJong

Perk Park, Cleveland

Sandra Pereznieto (2)

“A memorial is an architectural piece in which we can find the memory of culture and history; in the particular case of the Memorial to the Victims of the Violence in Mexico, we materialise, in terms of architecture, one of the most important and current issues of Mexican society: violence. This is the ‘open wound’ so to speak.” In response to this, GaetaSpringall Arquitectos (Julio Gaeta, Luby Springall, Ricardo López) proposed an open project, open to the city and open to appropriation by the citizens; a project with a strong relationship to the city and its inhabitants. The recuperation of public space as well as the remembrance of victims of violence are the essence of this memorial.

The site is located in Chapultepec, the most important park of Mexico City. This part of the forest belongs to the federal government and was in the custody of the Mexican Ministry of Defense for many decades. The creation of the memorial in 2013 has meant the city regains 15,000 square metres of public space.

The first premise of the project was to recognise the site as a forest; with a very strong presence of nature; the existing trees characterise the site.

Violence is suggested in two dimensions: the void and the built. The void proposed in the project is the space created between the steel walls and the trees. This void or empty space could remind people about the concept of the no-presences and absences of those lost to acts of violence, and the surfaces of the steel walls, rusty or reflective, show that we can lose ourselves, find ourselves, or even mutiply ourselves.

Apart from that, if we think of violence as destruction, the construction of seventy steel walls suggests a powerful retaliation against violence.

The project uses a reduced palette of materials, i.e. steel and concrete, inserted into the natural environment of the forest.

Corten steel is used in three ways: natural, rusty, or mirroring; each of these surface types suggests different meanings.

The rusty steel means the marks and scars that time creates in our lifetime. The mirroring steel is used to reflect and multiply the living: persons, trees, and the water of the central space, and the natural steel is used as an unperturbed element that reminds people of the main and essential values that ­societies must keep to live in peace. Concrete is used for the lanes and the benches, for walking and reflection.

The design by Thomas Balsley Associates transforms a long-neglected space in Cleveland into a lively urban environment. Existing trees and modified versions of the planted mounds were preserved.

f­ avourite haunt of vagrants and pigeons, an unloved and underused blight in the middle of the bustling central business district.

Shade trees, as well as modified versions of the original planted mounds, have been preserved from the old ­design, but are now complimented by a broad, open lawn area atop the former central sink, punctuated by a sculptural knoll perfect for daylight lounging. Clear sight lines replace the huddled

bunkers. On the space’s north side, an intimate seating area is embedded in a grove of honey locusts, the trees casting their dappled shade on a forest floor of crushed stone. The oval mounds scattered throughout provide topographic ­relief, and their gentle curvilinear forms contrast with a geometric grid of six-metrehigh light wands that echoes the rhythm of the nearby buildings while providing night-time drama.

The Jury of the International Carlo Scarpa Prize for Gardens had dedicated the 2013 cultural campaign to the garden of Skrudur, a place among the fjords in the west of Iceland that helps us to understand the fundamental themes of the country’s geography, history, and culture.

Skrudur is a vegetable garden near the shores of the Dýrafjördur, one of the fjords that indent the western part of Iceland, in the far north of the country, just a few kilometres from the Arctic Circle. Laid out on an incline facing southwest towards the inlet, it is backed by a grim chain of much eroded mountains and fronted by barren land sloping down to the edge of the fjord.

Beside the garden stands a school, a church and the farm of Núpur where, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a community launched a ­social improvement project that in such terrain and such a place represented a challenge to extreme environmental conditions: working the land and nurturing a process ­designed to cultivate know­ ledge, well-being, education and social emancipation.

The Fondazione Benetton ­Studi Ricerche has promoted and carried out an awarenessraising campaign since 1990, the International Carlo Scarpa Prize for Gardens, awarded to a location which is particularly rich in natural, historical and creative values.

Save this Date: Topos will meet in Munich Topos invites you to their conference and ceremony for the Topos Landscape Awards 2013, to be held in Munich on 10 September. Under the title “Integrated Urbanism”, the conference’s lectures and discussions will explore the question of what role landscape ­architects will play in the complex planning tasks of building and rebuilding our cities in the future.

More info on www.toposmagazine.com, as well as in a newsletter that will be sent out at the end of June. (free subscription to newsletter).

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Alex Ulam

World Trade Center

Memorial Hundreds of Swamp White Oaks dominate the space around the two voids in Lower Manhattan, where the towers of the World Trade Center stand. The plaza of the 9/11 Memorial is built upon a huge green roof.

To step onto the sprawling seven-acre 9/11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan is to enter a visual force field. This is a place vibrating with a tension between solids and voids, symmetry and disorder, light and dark. Various elements, such as sections of lawn, light fixtures and blocks of cobblestone pavers line up along the East-to-West axis of this immense flat plaza, but they are placed in a staggered fashion along the site’s North-to-South axis. The most pronounced example of this effect is the arrangement of the hundreds of Swamp White Oaks (Quercus ­bicolor), which dominate this otherwise austere plaza.

All sense of order and balance are completely disrupted when, after walking through one of the allées of trees, you reach the site of one of the former towers. Here, ringed by bronze parapets engraved with the names of the victims of 9/11, the plaza’s seemingly flat ground plane, which in reality is slightly graded, abruptly drops away. Below is a deep, dark reflecting pool, about an acre in size, which is fed by thousands of little rivulets. In the center of the square-shaped reflecting pool is a large void into which all matter seems to disappear.

Incredibly, the 9/11 Memorial does not actually rest atop terra firma.

Instead, it is built upon one the most distinctive green roofs in the United States. Sections of ribbed drains stretching along the plaza’s East-toWest axis catch virtually all of the excess rainwater not immediately consumed by the trees and patches of lawn. A system of pipes guides the storm-water runoff, as well as water from the reflecting pools, into two enormous tanks situated seven stories below, from where it is pumped back up to irrigate the forest of Swamp White Oaks in times of need.

At the 9/11 Memorial, the design elements are arranged in a staggered fashion along one axis, and a linear one along another, as is the case with the names of the victims of 9/11 engraved upon bronze parapets.

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Gini Lee

Forest, Garden, and Pleasure Ground for the New Century The design of the National Arboretum in Canberra, taking place after a period of devastating fires, reacts to anticipated challenges of diminishing biodiversity and accelerating climate change. The creation of new, highly diverse forests in a landscape that is to be both pragmatic and poetic is already underway.

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n a world driven by instant gratification, where new projects for landscapes are often predicated on the artificially “mature”, the National Arboretum in Canberra, Australia, challenges the visitor to imagine what will be, as much as it reminds of what has come before. Its visible landscape at this moment in time reveals the contours and bones of the original landscape overlain by patterns of newly planted trees in a colourful celebration of the tree guard. Upon arrival there is a moment of intensity to be experienced where the vista opens out to the newly formed buildings that simultaneously straddle and project out from the hill slope to hover above the beautifully graded, sinuous terracing and zigzag pathways flowing down the hill to drain into the Arboretum dam. This is a very new landscape and it requires imagination to see the future dynamic and diverse forest of 100 tree species and associated gardens. Yet, it is a rare opportunity to witness the beginnings of a new landscape designed as a poetic vision for the future forest, as it is also a pragmatic project for sustaining biodiversity in a changing world.

TCL’s concept for the National Arboretum in Canberra is based on the idea of “100 Forests and 100 Gardens”. Trees are selected based on their rare, endangered, or cultural status. The image shows the recently planted forest of Populus euphratica.

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James Hitchmough, Nigel Dunnett

Design and planting strategy in the Olympic Park, London

In early July, the stadium rises out of hectares of blue and yellow annual meadows of native and non-native species, a clear statement of intent that nature-like planting would heavily shape the experience of the Olympic Games.

Large-scale and visually-dramatic designed plantings were the dominant and most visually-prominent element in the London 2012 Olympic Park. The planting strategy is based on the consideration that the green space had to achieve biodiversity outcomes. At the same time, it is a clear statement about the future of parks and planting design.

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