LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS - scape - Landscape architecture and ...

ZOO EMMEN
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS
06
06
BOUVIGNE CASTE BREDA
GENIEDIJK STELLING VAN AMSTERDAM ATTRACTION PARK DE EFTELING
MTD | Zuid-Willemsvaart 142 | Post box 5225 | 5201 GE ‘s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands
T 31 (0)73 6125033 | F 31 (0)73 6136665 | E mtd@mtdlandschapsarchitecten.nl
06
06
’scape 1/2006 Hot spots: Barcelona, Beijing, Shanghai / Karres & Brands / Coastal strips www.scapemagazine.com
’scape
The international magazine for landscape architecture and urbanism 2006 / 1
Hot spots Barcelona: language and significance / European Biennal for landscape architecture /
China: higher, bigger, faster / 101 Metropolises / Karres en Brands’ power of invention
PostScript-illustratie
ISBN.3-7643-7511.eps
Park Piedra Tosca in Les Preses, Girona, Spain:
winner of the Rosa Barba prize.

’scape
The international magazine
for landscape architecture
and urbanismn
This is the first number of ’scape, the new international
magazine for landscape architecture and urbanism. ’scape is
an initiative of the editors of the Dutch magazine Blauwe
Kamer. Years ago they received the request to publish an
English-language edition. Blauwe Kamer aroused
international interest through its combination of town
planning and urban design and landscape architecture –
specialist fields that are increasingly entwined and which
also have a growing international orientation. Planners,
designers and architects work together, with an
international interest. This is why ’scape is being published.
’scape offers a journalistic, critical, professional and
international view of the design of landscapes and
townscapes. ’scape informs, raises opinions and inspires, and
contains news, features, interviews, portraits, design
criticism, essays, book reviews and commentaries. The
magazine is produced for landscape architects and garden
designers, planners and urban designers, ecologists,
architects, developers, geographers, artists and anyone in
the public or private sectors and education or research with
an interest in landscape and urban design.
’scape is produced and edited by the makers of Blauwe
Kamer and the triennial Landscape Architecture Europe,in
collaboration with Birkhäuser – Publishers for Architecture.
This international team is working enthusiastically and with
expertise on the publication of two numbers a year. By
doing so, we hope that we can help you to contribute to the
development of the specialist fields and the spatial quality
of town- and landscapes.
The editors
1 / 2006 ’SCAPE 3

’scape
1/ 2006
16 Avant-garde
Modernism appeared as a liberating activity to the Catalans. In
Barcelona, landscape architects keep inventing new forms and
significations for avant-garde urban landscapes, which are influencing
the methods of work and activities of the Northern
European professionals.
26
34
42
44
Hot spots
Inspiration from the Biennale
More entries, more participants and much industrial heritage:
the fourth Biennale for Landscape Architecture in Barcelona.
However, the Biennale is in particular a meeting of landscape
architects from all over Europe, with each other, and with that
special town along the Catalan coast.
Record speed in China
At a record speed China is replacing its old districts by copies of
European urban planning and by often spectacular high-rise
buildings. However, this also has its drawbacks. For example, is
it possible to have an Olympic marathon in 2008, with all the
thick smog of Beijing?
Building excavation China
From all over the world architects and urban planners are
going to China to manage the immense building needs. A
discussion with China visitor Rem Koolhaas. What is the responsibility
of western architects and urban planners in this display
of planning power?
Atlas of world cities
The Metropolitan World Atlas is the first atlas that is based on
urban agglomerations. Editor Arjan van Susteren has made a
book with maps with the same scale, so that the metropolises
can be compared with regard to numerous criteria.
1 / 2006 ‘scape 5

6 ’SCAPE 1 / 2006
in this issue
news 8
Urbanism in Europe
Peter Walker’s empty spots in New York
Book: the best landscape architecture in Europe
Moscow s building a new district
Designing for New Orleans after Katrina
Lexicon concerning landscape architecture
London is condensed with new houses
portrait 50
Karres en Brands landschapsarchitecten have created a
major landscape architectural oeuvre that is starting to
receive international recognition. Metropolitan design
skills characterise the office, as do independent thinking,
remarkable sensitivity for context, and an ability to
reinvent themselves anew with every project.
essay 60
On the tourist-recreational map of Europe hotspots and
trendy activities follow each other up at a fast pace,
cities and regions are developing their hinterland and
landscapes are made available for consumptive development.
Enough challenges for European landscape
designers, according to Johan Meeus.
review 64
Near Copenhagen, Denmark, an elongated beach park
has been built in front of the island of Amager.
Concrete constructions create a confusion, but they also
give an identity to the beach.
The Dutch resort Egmond aan Zee has given its North-
Sea side a facelift according to the current fashion in
the public space design: plain, empty, well-organised
and beautifully stylised materials.
With its coastal project the Spanish town of Salou is
hiding from the intrusive tourism that dominates the
coastal areas. The park connects the Mediterranean Sea
to its hinterland in a natural way.
ground plan 80
In this column we focus on special city maps. For exam-
ple, this tourist map from the American map publisher
Meridian Graphics. ‘Portrait San Francisco’ is one of the
more beautiful copies.
’scape
Volume 1
’scape, the international magazine for Landscape
Architecture and Urbanism is
produced and edited by Lijn in
Landschap Foundation, Schip van Blaauw,
Gen. Foulkesweg 72, 6703 BW Wageningen,
The Netherlands
T +31 (0) 317 425890, F +31 (0) 317 425886
info@scapemagazine.com
www.scapemagazine.com
’scape is published twice a year in collaboration
with Birkhäuser – Publishers for Architecture,
P.O. Box 133, CH-4010 Basel,
Switzerland
Part of Springer Science + Business Media
www.birkhauser.ch
Board
Fons Asselbergs (chairman), Tineke Blok,
Gert Middelkoop, Willem Verbaan, Karen
van Vliet
Editorial board
Bert Bukman, Rob van der Bijl, Lisa
Diedrich, Harry Harsema and Mark
Hendriks
in cooperation with Maarten Ettema, Maris
van der Laak (translation), Derek Middleton
(translation), Marinke Steenhuis, Hank
van Tilborg, Peter Paul Witsen
Contributions
Kristof Van Assche, Henri Bava, Noël van
Dooren, Malene Hauxner, Meinoud
Hehenkamp, Elisabeth Keller, Christiaan
Krouwels, Johan Meeus, Lodewijk
Wiegersma, Martin Woestenburg
Secretariat and back office
Annemarie Roetgerink
info@scapemagazine.com
Design
Michel Backus, Marjan Gerritse and Harry
Harsema. Marijke Apeldoorn (illustrations)
Printing
Modern, Bennekom, The Netherlands
ISSN 1389-742x
© 2006
Stichting Lijn in Landschap Foundation
and Birkhäuser – Publishers for Architecture
This edition of ’scape magazine, including
all parts and articles in it, is protected by
international copyright. Prior permission
shall be obtained in writing from the
publishers for any use that is not explicitly
permissible under the copyright law. This is,
in particular, true of duplications, processing,
translations, microfilms, storing
contents to memory and processing in electronic
form.
A bird’s eye view of Dutch landscape architecture
The Netherlands is an ‘invented land’. Its towns, villages and
landscapes have often arisen out from the ideas of
designers, including landscape architects. Peter van Bolhuis,
landscape architect, writer and aerial photographer, picks
out the highlights from more than fifty years of landscape
architecture in the Netherlands. He unveils the special
features of each site and exposes their spatial architecture.
Perspectives and examples
Sustainable Urban Design, perspectives and examples,
describes, in a clear and accessible manner, sustainable
urban design as it is practiced at the present time in the
Netherlands. By means of an historical sketch and clear,
richly illustrated examples of present-day projects, the
authors show that sustainable urban design is no utopia. It is
a form of urban design that is undergoing continual development
in day-to-day building practice and one that is gaining
an ever more unquestioned position within the discipline.
Blauwdruk publishers
www.uitgeverijblauwdruk.nl
The Invented Land
Sustainable Urban Design
The invented Land 176 pages full colour, bilingual ISBN 90-75271-17-4 € 39,-
Sustainable urban design 176 pages full colour, bilangual ISBN 90-75271-19-0 € 37,all
prices include VAT, exclude shipment
1 / 2006 ’SCAPE 7

news
The launch of the European yearbook
of landscape architecture -
Fieldwork – Landscape Architecture
in Europe – took place recently in
Rome.
It marked the end of a production
process of many years. In mid-2004, the
foundation for Landscape Architecture
Europe invited landscape architects,
artists and designers throughout
Europe to submit projects that had
been carried out. The best and most
high-profile designs were to be
published in the book Fieldwork. This
book presents a representative crosssection
of contemporary landscape
architecture on the continent.
Quality and professional expertise in
the assessment of the plans and in the
production of the book - this was the
guarantee given by the Dutch landscape
architect Michael van Gessel, the
initiator of the book, and the former
professor Meto Vroom of Wageningen
The Rotterdam practice Maxwan
architects + urbanists are making the
masterplan for the new city of
Novoye Kommunarka near Moscow
after winning an international design
competition. In the final round they
beat the design teams of John
Thompson & Partners (England) and
Albert Speer & Partner (Germany).
Novoye Kommunarka is a major
urban extension to the south-west of
the Moscow ring road, which encloses
the vast majority of the city. The location
is a former sovkhoz, or state
farm, and is set among natural
forests and scattered urban settlements.
The area is popular among
Muscovites wanting to escape the
city: it contains many dachas (traditional
Russian country cottages) and
The best landscape architecture
of Europe
View of the Forum of Trajan from the bridge of Nemesi Studio.
University, who acts as chairman of the
foundation, in their invitation for
submissions.
Substantial size
More than six hundred professional
colleagues accepted the invitation and
Maxwan planning Moscow extension
Birds-eye view of the new city in Russia designed by Maxwan.
sent in their best plans. According to
Van Gessel, there was a great deal of
’landscaping’ and ‘over design’ among
the entries and some of them could be
described quite bluntly as ‘boring’. Only
43 designs were eventually selected.
The book, which is substantial in size,
was launched in Rome on 11 February
2006. There are French, German and
Dutch editions besides the English one.
The intention is that Fieldwork will
appear every three years and the next
edition is scheduled for 2009.
Almost one hundred people were
present at the launch of the book. As
chairman of the jury, Michael van
Gessel explained how the selection
procedure had taken place. Most of the
projects concern cities and come mainly
from Western Europe. In Van Gessel’s
view, there is no question of a radical
break with the past or a shock of innovation.
Regrettably there are few
designs for private gardens, nor are
there designs for large-scale landscapes.
Master plans and regional
designs are also conspicuous by their
absence.
Fragile
Fieldwork contains a plan for a walkway
over the classical Roman ruins in
Chairman of the jury Michael van
Gessel: ‘Much landscaping and
overdesign.’
the Forum Romanum drawn up by the
Roman Nemesi Studio.
Forum Romanum has been etched in
my memory as a deep hole where you
need a guide to help you identify the
objects in the various historic layers.
Visiting it on your own means you have
new villas are being built. A consortium
of private firms wants to build a
new city for about 160,000 people.
Maxwan’s plans are for about
46,000 mainly detached houses. The
masterplan puts great emphasis on
the landscape character of the area. A
network of parks and urban woodlands,
which closely follows the existing
pattern of watercourses and
water bodies, will connect the residential
zones. The metropolitan functions
are located along the main arterial
route to Moscow. These include a
business district, with high-rise buildings,
and a campus area with independent
building complexes set in a
green environment, which will house
a university and several leisure facilities.
A number of industrial estates
to puzzle to try and discern the significance
of the remains of the buildings.
With rough Corten steel plates and
shiny stainless steel railings, Nemesi
Studio rolls out a veritable route
through the Forum of Trajan. The route
is suspended free of the walls and was
built without radical alterations. It
allows the visitor to stand eye to eye
with Roman architecture and objects
whilst at the same time maintaining a
distance from these elements.
It is only at the location itself that
the fragility of the construction is
noticeable. Some of those present were
overcome by a feeling of vertigo. It
seems that stainless steel can rust and
Corten steel becomes shiny and slippery
when walked on a lot. Both types
of steel show no welds.
The construction attracts so much
attention that it is not clear what is
really on show here. Only after reading
Fieldwork does it appear that the
Forum of Trajan was built by Appodollorus
van Damascus in 114 B.C.‘The
Forum was at the centre of the classical
world and holds a unique place in
Western civilization’.
8 ’SCAPE 1 / 2006 1 / 2006 ’SCAPE 9
See also page 77.
Johan Meeus
are also located along the route. Various
smaller urban centres are
planned throughout the area, which
is composed of four separate zones.
Maxwan is working on the project
with H+N+S Landschapsarchitecten
(Netherlands), the European engineering
and environmental consultancy
URS and the landscape practice
Martha Schwartz Partners (United
States).
Peter Paul Witsen
in short
Landscape architects, designers, artists, plant specialists and garden owners
can submit their garden designs for the best garden prize for 2006 until 12
June. This prize is organised by the team from Austria’s Private plots & Public
spots. Entries will be judged on aesthetic terms, innovative design solutions
and the use of materials and ecological principles. The winner will be announced
during an international symposium on garden architecture to be held on
29 and 30 September.
www.privateplots.at.
The European Urban Landscape Partnership, a recently set up network of
European cities, schools, governments and companies, is organising a seminar
in Vienna on 19 and 20 May. This meeting will act as a platform where
anyone involved in European city scapes can exchange information and experiences.
The underlying idea is that cities can learn from each other on the
subject of the development of solution strategies.
On the first day, there will be a discussion of several cases, like that of Barcelona,
Oslo, Budapest, Berlin, Birmingham and Istanbul. The keynote speaker will
be Maguelonne Déjeant-Pons of the Council of Europe, who will talk about the
Landscape Convention signed last year. On the second day there will be excursions
to various locations in Vienna.
www.urban-landscape.net.
The Conference for the Eastern Region of the International Federation of
Landscape Architects (IFLA) will be held in Sydney from 25 to 27 May. The
theme of the event will be the theory and practice of the profession in eastern
Asia, Australia and New Zealand. Speakers include Kathryn Gustafson, Kongjiam
Fu, Professor and Director of the Chinese firm of Turenscape and the
Columbian IFLA President Martha Fajardo.
In October the annual IFLA World Congress will take place in Minneapolis in
the United States. This is the largest event in the world for landscape architects.
Visitors can participate in workshops and excursions, and also visit the
accompanying EXPO open air exhibition where various designs can be seen.
See also: www.iflaonline.org.
The M-30 through Madrid will be constructed underground in a six-kilometrelong
tunnel with four exits. Construction work will transform the nearby river
valley from being on the far side of Madrid into being near the entrance to the
city. The municipal authorities invited the Swiss firm of Herzog & deMeuron,
the Dutch firms of OMA and West 8, and the Frenchman Dominic Perrault to
draw up a design for this area. In March Mayor Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón announced
that the Rotterdam firm West 8 was the winner; its design includes a park
with five streams, a promenade and a bridge.

news
An Alkmaar live/work warehouse.
The winners of Europan 8, the international
competition for young architects,
have been announced. Sixtyone
teams of architects, urban designers
and landscape architects submitted
winning entries for sites across
Europe. Their brief was to add ‘urbanity’
– the positive qualities of collective
life in the city – to urban sites.
Europan is a European design
competition organised in separate
national competitions. In the Netherlands
the entrants could turn their skills
to one of six sites, each presenting a
specific challenge, in Alkmaar,
Dordrecht, Enschede, Haarlem, Tilburg
and Zwolle. For the first time there was
no overarching competition theme.
Previous sessions of Europan demonstrated
that European cities face similar
problems – typical urban issues relating
to the quality of urban spaces that the
European organisers call ‘urbanity’.
Starting with this eighth Europan, the
particular problems that stand in the
10 ’SCAPE 1 / 2006
Designing for urbanity in Europan 8
The Zwolle platform . Shepherd’s Garden in Tilburg.
way of urbanity are decided separately
for each site.
Reference
In Zwolle the aim was to make use of
a forgotten piece of farming landscape
on the northern edge of the city for typical
central area activities for which there
is no room in the city centre itself. The
winning team – consisting of the
Germans Fabrice Henninger, Gabriel
Kiderlen, Helga Schmid and Rainer
Geerdes – devised an elongated platform
linking the existing residential
neighbourhoods of Stadshagen and
Westenholte. The platform provides
space for a railway station, shops and a
multistorey car park. The Dutch Europan
jury, chaired by Anna Vos, was impressed
by their design for the public space, with
its reference to the openness of the old
landscape.
The site in Tilburg is in the western
part of the city centre. This site is to
become a secluded residential oasis. It
was not an easy brief because the ring
Contour-shaped housing block in Haarlem.
road runs along the edge of the site and
a number of buildings and trees have to
be retained. Dominique ter Beek, Chris
Luth and the Swede Jenny Eklund
designed a strip of buildings with a
central communal space called Shepherd’s
Garden. The strip contains spaces
for a variety of uses, from workshops
and studios on the ground floor to penthouses
on the second floor.
In the eyes of the jury many of the
entrants for the site in Haarlem
misjudged the brief. The area is located
between J.D. Zocher’s green structure
and the site of the former Phoenix
textile factory close to sections of the
old fortifications, and needs to be treated
with respect. The only entrant to
successfully achieve this was Rindert
Gerritsma. He designed a readily accessible
housing block whose contours
blend into the shape of the site.
More freedom
At first sight, the Enschede brief
appeared to be the simplest: the redevelopment
of a site on the edge of the
city centre and a small green residential
area. But the designs did not meet the
jury’s high expectations. One plan stood
out from the rest: Triade, by Robert
Verrijt and Floris Cornelisse. They creat-
Triade in Enschede.
Waterfront development along the Merwede in Dordrecht.
ed an attractive design for the city block
in the form of an industrial complex,
complete with a wall and courtyard. The
jury found the transition from tall to
low buildings to be just right. Only the
green component could have been
treated with a little more care.
The future use of the Dordrecht site
was made known only when the design
process was already underway. This
gave the designers a freer hand, and
the plan by Wouter van Alebeek and
Joost van Noort came out as winner in
the end. These two architects designed
an urban ‘barcode’ lying on an imitation
deck. Cuttings and slopes provide room
for a variety of uses and different house
types.
In Alkmaar an old industrial site
along the railway line and the Noord-
Hollands canal had to be transformed
into a vibrant and visible urban centre
where intrusive noise has been
banished for good. René Berbee and
Marc Holvoet from Belgium designed
three live/work ‘bazaars’, with new
sightlines running between them. The
power of the design, according to the
jury, lies in the way the designers have
retained the existing plot layout.
Desire
Dutch designers were also successful
in the other countries’ competitions.
Dagobert Bergmans and the American
Thomas van Arman produced the
winning entry for Erfurt in Germany. The
landscape architects from Lola landscape
architects – Eric-Jan Pleijster, Peter
Veenstra and Cees van der Veeken –
with the architects Pieter Sprangers and
the Irishman Finnbarr McComb were
the winners for the Sintra site in Portugal.
Their design reconciles the desire to
live in a green environment with the
need to conserve a valuable nature park.
Mark Hendriks
See also www.europan.nl and
www.europan-europe.com
in short
The European Council of Town Planners (ECTP) will present the European
Urban and Regional Planning Achievement Award 2006 (EURPA Award) in
the autumn. The ETCP wishes to show with this prize how diverse planning
activities in Europe are, what the advantages of interactive and regionally
oriented planning processes are, and which plans actually contribute to attractive
European cities and regions. The ceremony will be held in Seville.
Information: www.ceu.ectp.org.
At the Global City Conference organised by Reed Midem in Lyon from 17 to 19
May, city councillors and experts can exchange ideas, concepts and practical
experiences on the best way of urban development. Representatives from
Barcelona, Ghent, Seattle, Freiburg, The Hague, Nantes, Leeds, Budapest and
Stockholm will be present. There will be papers from the architects Renzo
Piano and Jan Gehl, and a mayors’ panel will be held.
www.globalcityforum.com.
True Urbanism and Healthy Communities. This is the theme of the 44th International
Making Cities Livable Conference. Speakers like Diane D. Denish,
Governor of New Mexico, Dean Michael Lykoudis of the University of Notre
Dame in Indiana, Gabriele Tagliaventi, Professor at the Italian University of
Ferrara and many others will discuss the principles of ‘true’ urban development,
the relationship between health and the built environment, social cohesion
and citizen participation in planning processes.
The Conference will be held in the American city of Santa Fe.
See: www.livablecities.org.
The International Freising Garden Fair will be held for the tenth time this year
from 12 to 14 May to celebrate this milestone in the history of the gardens of
the Freising-Neustift convent in Germany.
Professional garden designers and florists will demonstrate ways of making a
real garden, even in small areas, like a balcony or window sill, and there will be
an exhibition with model gardens, and growers from the whole of Europe will
be there. There will also be talks, including one by the Dutch botanist Piet
Oudolf.
Contact: Anita Fischer, info@anitafischer-landschaftsarchitektin.de.
The second European Landscape Conference will be held in Lille from May 31 to
June 2 around the theme ‘Protéger la planète: the landscape vision’. The event
is organised by the French Landscape Federation (FFP) in cooperation with the
EFLA and the IFLA.
During the conference visitors can join lectures, workshops and debates. At the
last day two round table discussions will be organized. In the first journalists
will talk about European reviews and publictions. At the second round table
politicians and landscape architects discuss their possible collaboration. With
Henri Bava, Gilles Vexlard, Joan Roig and Roberto d’Agostino, mayor of Venice.
www.f-f-p.fr.
1 / 2006 ’SCAPE 11

news
Peter Walker: ‘The Twin Towers Project is the culmination of my work.’
The American landscape architect Peter Walker has been awarded the Geoffrey
Jellicoe Gold Medal by the International Federation of Landscape Architects
(IFLA). This medal is the highest possible honour that the IFLA can give a landscape
architect.
The gigantic voids of Peter Walker
Newer Orleans will never forget Katrina
On 16 February American and
Dutch planning and water
management experts met in the
Netherlands Architecture Institute
(NAi) to discuss flood disasters.
This was in response to the flooding
of the American city of New
Orleans in the wake of hurricane
Katrina. Was the city poorly
protected? Did the relief effort
start too late? And could a similar
calamity strike the Netherlands?
The discussion focused on the gap
between policy and practice. According
to disaster expert Eelco Dijkstra of
George Washington University, there is
no awareness of disaster in the Dutch
collective consciousness, and talk of
risks is generally written off as fearmongering.
The American participants
were somewhat surprised to receive
Dutch compliments on the way they
Impression of final stage of the design by West 8.
deal with threats and disasters. The
American speakers complained that
their government made one mistake
after another during and after Katrina,
The Geoffrey Jellicoe Medal will be
presented once every four years to ‘a
landscape architect whose achievements
have had a lasting impact on the
welfare of society and the environment’.
The Medal was awarded for the
first time at the end of last year during
the IFLA Congress in Edinburgh. The jury
chose Peter Walker from the landscape
architects nominated because of the
major significance of his many projects,
books and lectures.‘Being a landscape
architect means everything to me’,
Peter Walker says in his first reaction.
Eighteen months ago the 73-year-old
designer received a similar award from
ASLA, the American Society of Landscape
Architects. ‘I would like to thank
IFLA for this great honour.’
Walker, who is relatively unknown in
Europe, is one of the most respected
landscape architects in the world. This
was highlighted last year when Walker,
together with architect Michael Arad,
but were full of praise over the way the
Dutch have managed to keep their
country dry for many centuries.
Besides this rather abstract discus-
won the design competition for the
World Trade Center Memorial in New
York. The competition was probably the
most discussed and emotionally
charged competition ever held for an
exterior space in America. Walker and
Arad’s winning design, titled Reflecting
Absence includes two gigantic voids on
the spot where the Twin Towers once
stood. In the plan, the impressions of
the towers remain empty, whilst the
space around them has been designed
as a park. Despite all his other projects
and successes, this is the project he will
be remembered by, Walker knows.
‘This project is the culmination of my
work’, he says but he immediately puts
this into perspective:‘or the opposite of
course, because it may backfire. If many
people know about it, you have a lot to
gain, but even more to lose. The risk is
enormous.’ And yet Walker is aware of
his privileged position.‘We are very
fortunate to be able to work on this
sion, the NAi also hosted the exhibition
‘Newer Orleans’. In addition to the
inevitable shocking pictures of the
disaster, six plans by American and
project. It is a fantastic project and I
think it is a very good plan. Unfortunately
the circumstances are not easy.
New York is a difficult place to build,
certainly because everyone is so
emotionally involved. But we have
another four years to go. We are working
on it every day.’
Conviction
Walker studied landscape architecture
at the Universities of California
and Illinois, and completed his master’s
degree at Harvard School of Design
where Frank O. Gehry was one of his
fellow students. After graduating in
1957, he set up the bureau of Sasaki,
Walker & Associates together with his
mentor Hideo Sasaki.‘The commissions
flowed in and after a few years we
opened a second office in San Francisco
which I was in charge of. We employed
more than 250 people at that time.’
After several years, Walker left the SWA
group because he had been asked to
succeed Sasaki as Head of the Department
of Landscape Architecture at
Harvard.‘During the twenty years I was
Dutch consultancies for rebuilding New
Orleans were also on display. Huff +
Gooden Architects of Charlston and
MVRDV of Rotterdam designed a
primary school. UN Studio and Morphosis
of Los Angeles produced a design for
a multimedia centre in downtown New
Orleans. West 8 and Hargreaves Associates
were both asked to design a
distinctive landscape for the broken city.
West 8 took on the former City Park.
Their design is built up in three stages.
First, the park will function as a temporary
relief centre for the many homeless
residents, where they can pitch their
tents or park their mobile homes. In
time, as these people return to their
homes in the city, water will be given a
more prominent place in the park. But
first it will have to be cleaned up. For
this, West 8 have designed a system of
lagoons called the Jordan, to be built by
volunteers, who will also plant two
million young trees. Their voluntary
efforts will symbolise the hope for a
Walker and Arad’s winning design,
titled Reflecting Absence, contains
two voids which refer to the spots
where the Twin Towers once stood.
in charge of the department, I started a
small experimental bureau, where I
worked with various people, including
Martha Schwartz and William Johnson.’
The bureau is now called Peter Walker
& Partners and is situated in Berkeley.
It is a teaching office, says Walker.
better future. In the third stage, the area
will be restored as a city park. Four main
elements in the park will define it as a
miniature Mississippi delta. Besides the
Jordan, there is the Promenade of Music
and the Path of Freedom jogging circuit.
And Katrina has not been forgotten: on
the Track of Katrina, people will be able
to wander past large lily ponds in
remembrance of those who died.
The design by Hargreaves places New
Orleans in a new network of engineering
works, with an eye to the urban
design and social problems left behind
by Katrina. From this infrastructure
network the city will be reoccupied by
its characteristically rich mixture of
cultures and communities. The
improved infrastructure has been
designed as a medium for restoring the
relation between the city’s people and
the water.
We have predominantly young people
working for us; they are the best
students from universities in America,
Europe and Asia. And they continue
their studies with us. The partners are
the faculty as it were.’
The way the bureau has been set up
is a reflection of Walker’s conviction
that developments in landscape architecture
are determined by the design
practice.‘The leading professionals
prepare the way. They are the ones that
confront the real problems in the real
world. If, for instance, I want to know
what is happening in the Netherlands, I
look at Adriaan Geuze. For France, I look
at Michel Desvigne. I am really interested
in what is happening in Europe.’
Pat on the back
In the almost fifty years that Walker
has been a landscape architect, the
field of study in the USA has expanded
enormously.‘When I graduated, there
were about two thousand landscape
architects in the United States. I knew
the majority of my most important
fellow colleagues personally, like Ian
McHarg, Stanley White and Lawrence
Halprin. I had no idea at that time that
it was such a unique situation. Nowadays
with roughly thirty thousand landscape
architects in America, this would
no longer be possible.’
The Jellicoe Medal this year and the
ASLA award last year are not the first
prizes notched up by Walker. In the
course of his long career, he has
received many distinctions and won
numerous design competitions. Walker
has always been pleased with the
attention.‘If you have ever made a
design, you will know how difficult it is
to make a good plan. Whenever I see a
design that I really like, I send a short
note to the designer. It is not easy and
you don’t get many pats on the back in
this profession. The landscape is usually
taken for granted.’
Meinoud Hehenkamp
Elizabeth Keller
More information on Peter Walker and his
bureau can be found at www.pwpla.com.
The plan for Ground Zero can be found at
www.wtcsitememorial.org.
12 ’SCAPE 1 / 2006 1 / 2006 ’SCAPE 13
Mark Hendriks
The three development stages for City Park in New Orleans: relief, recovery, use.

news
The publication of Meto Vroom’s
Lexicon of Garden and Landscape
Architecture marks the end of ten
years trawling through a vast and
varied body of literature for the
retired professor. His voluminous
book explains more than 300 landscape
terms. Meto Vroom was
professor of landscape architecture
at the Department of Spatial Planning,
Agricultural University of
Wageningen, the Netherlands,
from 1966 to 1995.
The idea for a book containing a
classification of terms used in garden
and landscape architecture stems
from an original initiative by the
University of Wageningen in 1996. A
number of enthusiasts wanted to
make a CD-ROM of inspirational landscape
projects from the twentieth
century. By clicking on a project the
user would be able to access descriptive
texts, illustrations and background
material. Because the plan was
to allow users to compare projects,
Meto Vroom was asked to work on the
Urhahn Urban Design advises London
The city authorities of London have
commissioned the Dutch firm of urban
designers Urhahn Urban Design to
examine ways of increasing the building
density of ten districts in North
London. A recently published report
has predicted that by 2016 the British
capital will have 800,000 more inhabitants
than at present, and the city will
need an extra 345,000 houses for
them.
Urhahn Urban Design presented a
catalogue full of design ideas for the
ten neighbourhoods. The designers
wanted to show with these proposals
that intensification does not necessarily
mean overfull neighbourhoods
Meto Vroom and the language
of landscape architecture
Leonardo da Vinci’s bicycle.
formulation of a clear and unambiguous
terminology. ‘It was a wonderful
idea,’ reminisces Vroom in his study in
Wageningen. ‘A database that would
allow you to browse through a whole
range of projects. But as is the case
with so many great ideas, there was
not enough money. The 43,000 guilder
subsidy was soon exhausted and the
participants pulled out one by one
The busy Crouch End district in London. Is intensifcation still possible?
with no green areas and no open
spaces. Well thought-out additions to
because of other commitments.’
Vroom decided to continue on his
own and focus his efforts on compiling
a workable lexicon for his beloved
discipline. Working alone suited him
fine. ‘It was a joy to read works from
this wonderful and expanding literature.
I was a regular visitor to the
university library, where I was given a
free hand. And I collected many books
existing developments can in fact
create more vitality and jobs. The
at home,’ recounts Vroom, gesturing to
the bulging bookcases that line his
attic room.
Charles Dickens
According to the New Oxford Dictionary
of English, a lexicon is ‘the vocabulary
of a person, language or branch of
knowledge’.‘The book’s title is Lexicon
of Garden and Landscape Architecture,
but it is in fact my own language. If
someone else had written it, the
contents would undoubtedly have been
different.’The book is not a dictionary,
although it is almost long enough to be
one. Each entry includes a short definition,
but this is followed by an extensive
explanation and a personal essay. Technical
aspects are hardly touched on.
Vroom explains:‘When I talk about
something I think in terms of perceptions,
impressions and references, and
what it means to people. The book
describes the terms in a context: where
do they come from and how are they
used? So I did not just read the specialist
literature, but also Charles Dickens and
the works of Margaret Atwood.’
report does not designate actual
locations for the houses, but it does
indicate the opportunities where a
city can incorporate such numbers,
and the preconditions which are
important for actually achieving this.
According to the study there are
three. First, greater densification
means that there must be more traffic
modalities than the car alone to
prevent roads becoming clogged.
Second, districts with high-quality
public transport hubs must be used
as intensively as possible. Third, there
must be a merging of functions to
maintain the socio-economic level of
an urban district.
Mark Hendriks
Vroom drew inspiration from seven
hundred books and the same number of
journal articles. This makes the Lexicon
not only a reference work but a doorway
to a much richer experience. From the
philosophical term Arcadia the reader
wanders, via the practical word ‘fountain’
and the policy construct ‘nature
conservation’, past design terms such as
‘perspective’ and ‘sightline’ to the ideas
encapsulated by ‘modernism’ and
‘casco’.
Never finished
Despite the pleasure he obtained
from his work, Vroom also went through
periods of uncertainty during his quest.
Have I covered everything, do I know
enough, am I missing something? He
experienced all these doubts. The retired
professor found support from his ex
students and professional colleagues,
who reviewed and commented on his
drafts, a task which was later taken over
by an editorial board. And then the book
was ready. In fact, though, a book like
this is never finished. As the literature
continues to expand, the lexicon should
really continually be updated. Vroom
speaks from experience.‘Even when the
book was almost ready to be sent to the
printer, I came across a bicycle in Berlin
that was designed by Leonardo da Vinci.
This bicycle illustrated precisely what I
had written about the term ‘system’.
I hastily took a photograph, which was
included in the book. You can say that
this project more or less took over my
life during the last ten years. Whatever I
read, wherever I looked, the lexicon was
always in the back of my mind.’
Chaos theory
Sometimes Vroom had to draw the
line. When preparing his discussion of
the term ‘geometry’ he was led into an
exploration of fractals, and from there
became embroiled in chaos theory.
‘There came a time when I simply had to
call it a day. You cannot write about
material that is beyond you.’ Neither did
he always follow tips given by his regular
reviewers.‘As I said, this is my lexicon.
I quite understand that other people
may think differently about certain
topics, that they would scrap certain
terms or describe them differently.’The
old professor smiled.‘I sincerely hope
that my book stirs up controversy. The
lexicon is a good starting point for a
debate about the terminology used in
the profession of garden and landscape
architecture.’
Town centre enhancement with new public gardens, art galleries and restaurants,
Crouch End, London.
Henri Bava
Between Barcelona
and Venice
The word landscape is on everyone’s lips: attractive, flexible and
short, it is ‘trendy’. People are falling over themselves for it. Always
indispensable, now it has become imperative. For some years now it
has even had its own Biennale in Barcelona; just like architecture has
its own in Venice. One has just finished; the other is already in preparation.
But for anysomeone attracted by these events and debates and
wanting to make landscape their profession the question arises:
where is it best taught? The answer is not easy because, with the European
educational reform known as the Bologna Reform (Bachelor,
Master, PhD) cutting education up into small modules, an institution
that does not have some landscape in its curriculum is becoming a
rarity.
Schools and faculties of architecture have almost all without exception
added this word to their study programmes, and have most often
substantiated it with high standards, considerable attention and
detailed information. They have combined it with different disciplines
such as urban design, art, and of course architecture. But have
they supplanted the ‘landscape’ schools? It is hard to compare the
content of what the institutions teach, but the schools have such an
appetite for change and such application that at first glance it seems
as though the balance of power was has been in their favour. In fact
they have set up the encounter – often decisive – between the student
and the landscape. Nevertheless, and yet they do not train landscape
architects.
Conversely, I believe that the essential difference is basically about
ideas of duration and motivation. Just like as you do not become an
architect in two years, you do not become a landscape designer in
this short period of time either. The necessary maturation engenders
a desire for conquest that transforms graduates in both disciplines
into ‘knights’ passionately ready to engage body and soul to change
the world and to prove how fully justified their apprenticeship washas
been. With this criterion used as a yardstick, the plethora of European
schools suddenly fades away: few teach landscape continuously
from the Bachelor’s to the Master’s degree and the doctorate.
Or else you can do what the landscape architect Frederick Law
Olmsted did, or the architects Peter Zumthor and Tadao Ando: start
by doing something completely different.
Henri Bava is landscape architect, principal of Agence Ter and
professor at the University of Karlsruhe.
14 ’SCAPE 1 / 2006 1 / 2006 ’SCAPE 15
Mark Hendriks
Meto J. Vroom, Lexicon of Garden and
Landscape Architecture. Basel: Birkhauser.
Price € 39.90. See also page 77.

Hot spots
Barcelona, Beijing, Shanghai:
hotspots of landscape architecture
and urbanism
Not so long ago, Barcelona was just one of these
Mediterranean harbour cities whose streets smelled
of fish and oil and cars. For a long time the Catalans
were paralysed as such – Franco’s dictatorship didn’t
want Catalonia and its capital to be pretty or powerful.
Much energy was oppressed – and almost exploded
after Franco’s death, creating a movement of
activity and ingenious renewal. "Posa’t guapa", get
beautiful, was the motto of Oriol Bohigas, mayor
Maragall’s chief architect, set to encourage commitment
in renovation projects in order to prepare the
city for the Olympic Games of 1992. He managed to
attract a group of very young and very talented architects
from the Barcelona architecture school ETSAB to
work with him at the city’s architecture service, and
these "dibujadores de oro", golden designers, created
a totally new kind of public space, totally new forms,
a totally new comprehensive approach for renovating
a city. At the end of the 80s many international architects
flowed into Barcelona to admire the multitude
of new streets, squares and parks. At that time landscape
architecture hardly existed as a word in
Barcelona.
However, in the meanwhile, supported by landscape
architects of the architecture course of the
ETSAB, the "Biennal de paisatge", will be organised
for the fourth time this spring. This is the international
conference where landscape architects from all
over Europe come to meet each other in order to
learn about each other’s work and developments in
the field. In addition, the European Award for Urban
Public space will also be awarded for the fourth time
this summer. Barcelona remains the centre of international
interest, also because of the continuing flow
of innovative projects, such as the Forum 2004 and
the Parc Litoral along the coast just north of the city,
where the industry with its shining metal proves to
be an attractive background for recreation.
Since China has permitted commercial house
building in 1979, more than 350 million people have
moved from the countryside into the cities. The pace
and scale of Chinese urbanisation has reached stag-
OMA’s striking design for the new China Central
Television headquarters in Beijing.
Source: OMA/Rem Koolhaas, Ole Scheeren
16 ‘scape 1 / 2006 1 / 2006 ’SCAPE 17

Parc Litoral (Abalos & Herreros, 2004).
Parc Litoral.
gering proportions. Whole new cities are being built
at a phenomenal rate and one record after another is
being broken. A third of all building in the world
currently takes place in China. Admiration, fascination,
aversion.
China is eager to present itself to the outside
world as a new economic superpower. The 2008
Olympic Games are being organised by Beijing and
two years later Shanghai will host the World Expo.
Many European architects and urban designers are
working in China. They are asked to base their
designs on European architectural and artistic traditions.
Whole new districts are being built in German,
English and Dutch styles.
China is certainly the one of the hotspots, but will
cities such as Bejing and Sjanhai also become a place
of pilgrimage for urban planning and landscape
architecture? Although the most fantastic buildings,
districts and cities are being built, the Chinese are
paying a price in the form of unprecedented environmental
pollution, violation of human rights through
forced evictions, the destruction of historic districts
and disregard for their own culture. In Barcelona the
architectonic revolution was supported by a broad,
cultural movement, while in China the explosive
growth is strictly managed by the government.
Which role can architecture play in this case? Do
Western architects, planners and urban designers
wanting to work in China have to have a weakness
for totalitarian systems? Famous Dutch architect Rem
Koolhaas states: Western civilisation has two
hundred years of destruction on its conscience. In his
view it would be the ‘utmost arrogance’ to tell China
now how it should behave.
Photos: Harery Harsema
In the following pages Hank van Tilborg gives an
impression of this breathtaking urbanism in China
and its drawbacks. Peter Paul Witsen reports on a
debate with Rem Koolhaas, who designed the spectacular
new building for the Chinese state broadcasting
service. Malene Hauxner looks back on the eventful
period in Barcelona, in which the avant-garde of
landscape architecture, town and country planning
and architecture sought and found an expression.
Harry Harsema reports about the inspiring fourth
biennale of landscape architecture, where the
tension in the field between architecture and nature
development was explicitly present.
And then there is also the beautiful atlas of Arjan
van Susteren, who put 101 metropolises on the map.
By printing the maps on the same scale (1:750.000),
the result was a spectacular atlas in which the most
important metropolises of the world can be
compared with regard to numerous features. Rob van
der Bijl and Bert Bukman have met him: ‘The most
beautiful place in the world is not in one of these
cities, quite the reverse. The most beautiful part of
the world is the Sahara. Its absolute emptiness and
its absolute silence – no metropolis can come near
this, to be honest.’
Speaking about hotspots.
Reflections on the
avant-garde
The Igualada cemetery (Enric Miralles & Carme Pinos, 1985).
Because of the architecturally quiet period under the Franco regime, Modernism
appeared as a liberating activity to the Catalan. If they have owed anything to the
Scandinavian modern direction, they have repaid with interest in the meantime. In
Barcelona, landscape architects keep inventing new forms and significations for
avant-garde urban landscapes, which are influencing the approaches and activities
of the Northern European professionals.
Malene Hauxner
Language and significance in
Barcelona’s urban landscape
The Mediterranean and Scandinavia appear
to have something in common. Perhaps it is due
to the wind and the water, perhaps the marginal
geographical position. What leads to this observation
is that in these two regions there are
examples of architecture and landscape architecture
where the buildings and the landscape
are the prerequisites for each other, where
passages, transitions and architectural promenades
have a particular significance.
Alvaro Siza’s beach pools at Porto, Leca de
Palmeira (1961) and Carlo Scarpa’s Palazzo
Querini Stampalia in Venice (1961) possess
some of the same qualities as Alvar Aalto’s
Muuratsalo summer house (1953), Jørgen Bo,
Wilhelm Wohlert and Agnete Petersens’
Louisiana (1958), Jørn Utzon’s Roman houses
18 ’SCAPE 1 / 2006 1 / 2006 ’SCAPE 19
Photo: Hisao Suzuki

.. to shape the landscape so that it resembled an erosion cleft cutting
through the agricultural landscape
(1958) and Sverre Fehn’s Norwegian Pavilion at
the Venice Biennial (1962). In the south, shadows
are sharp; they give the landscape contours.
In the north the world is less clear. But the
dialogue with nature and the past is the same.
The city and the urbane can be seen as nature,
and movement is the fulcrum.
The Danish architecture theoretician Nils-Ole
Lund suggests that it was possible to build on
these modernist ideas in Barcelona because the
architecturally quiet period under the Franco
regime made Modernism seem like a liberating
activity rather than a straight-jacket. The
Spaniards were free of the idea that Modernism
was guilty of tearing the city apart and of the
descent of architecture into stereotypical repetition.
1 If the Catalans have owed anything to the
Scandinavian modern direction that they call el
organismo, they have repaid with interest.
Artificial flowers
The Igualada cemetery (Enric Miralles &
Carme Pinos, 1985) lies in an industrial area
with abandoned quarries and gravel pits. From
the gateway made of three steel supports one is
led past the chapel and the sacristy down into a
burial chamber through a passage whose walls
consist of stacked columbaria built into the
slopes that lean alternately inward and outwards,
broken by small passages that lead up into the
light to a first floor. The floor of the burial
chamber is concrete, surfaced with a smattering
of small stones. Something that looks like driftwood
in a river is pressed into the concrete.
Sloping concrete slabs cover graves grouped in
three quadrants. The walls that support the
slopes of the gravel pit are of ashlar-stone held
in place by rusty reinforcement netting bent
over at the top. The wall is built up in layers as if
there were sediments in the earth. Rosemary
and fir grow between the stones. Mausolea are
built into the walls with shutters of rusty cast
iron. The architraves and lintels are large
concrete beams. The association can be Eqyptian
temples or Jørgen Utzon’s Roman houses,
depending on one’s background. On the way
one is met by apparently self-seeded poplar trees
that cling to the earth to resist the current, if we
stay with the river metaphor, or like the trees in
Chinese cemeteries that must not be removed
The same applies to vertical, triangular stones
and lamps of rusty steel cut off slant-wise at the
top. Everything is irregular or according to an
Photos: Malene Hauxner
apparently natural order. The materials bear
witness to the passing of time. Steel rusts, trees
fade, concrete crumbles and plants wither. This
is a structure, not a building in a landscape built
up around a flow of movement. An illustration
that cultivation of the landscape can lead to
architecture and landscape architecture, that
building art can be enriched by an element of
cultivation. Unused, the graves lie open, when
occupied they are closed with a concrete slab,
forming a background for artificial flowers and
photographs of the deceased.
A white, open book with a sketch of a cat
signed MIS (Puss) bears witness that the creator,
Enric Miralles is buried here.
Miralles’ first instinct when he looked at the
task of creating a cemetery in this wasteland was
to shape the landscape so that it resembled an
erosion cleft cutting through the agricultural
landscape. By using diggers he was able to
hollow out the landscape faster than by natural
erosion. Tree crowns were to fill the gash and recreate
the original level of the landscape. The
whole cemetery would apparently disappear
under the ground and form a kind of communal
grave covered by a green grave-stone, from the
basic idea of placing a cut like the trace of a path
without disturbing the landscape. Miralles has
taken the inspiration for the path that marks a
movement from the Norwegian architect Sverre
Fehn. ‘A path comes into being out of the resolution
to proceed from one place to another and
this act determines its form….a series of
scratches on paper which by drawing assume
increasingly concrete forms and are gradually
filled with memories, with back-references, with
associations.’ 2
The cemetery is highly textural, which
Kenneth Frampton emphasises as a part of the
architectural direction ‘critical regionalism’.
Miralles has learnt about this in the written
lectures of the Danish architect Carl Petersen:
‘Textural effects’ and ‘Contrasts’, but also by
studying Gunnar Asplunds and Sigurd Lewerentz’
Woodland Cemetery in Enskede. 3
Sporadic impact
In the first years of the war many young architects
went to the Mediterranean countries
anonymously to study building and the cultivated
landscape. Some travelled as far as
Morocco, Mexico and China, others to Italy,
Greece and Andalusia. Then the stream
quietened for a time.
In 1968 the students demanded power to the
imagination. First American, apolitical hippies,
then Neo-Marxists and Anarchists in France,
Holland and Germany had a deep-rooted belief
in the spontaneous, free life and wanted to
return to nature, i.e. re-establish and recover the
natural life in all its purity and authenticity. Postwar
Modernism did not enter their imagination
– on the contrary.
They followed a language that like that of the
poster-artist Aubrey Beardsley was informed by
the psychedelic, Jugend and Art Nouveau styles.
El Modernismo , the Catalonian national romanticism
as it appeared in Antoni Gaudì’s exotic
Parc Güell could be used. The bizarre, turgid
forms, the intricate wrought-ironwork, the
City park in Vejle (Preben Skaarup, 1991). Harbour Park on Islands Brygge in Copenhagen
(Annelise Bramsnæs, 1994).
carved natural stone, the coloured glass, the
mosaics, the patterned tiles and exposed wood
had a material expression that entered the
language of the protests. 4
An early example of the new orientation in
this direction in Denmark is Ayala Green Belt
Park in Manila in the Philippines by architect
Hans Peder Pedersen and landscape architect
Peter Holst from the practice Box 25. A bridge
over a lake divides the park into a formal and
informal part with a waterfall of natural rock.
From the period when there had been a garden
centre on the site there were some large groups
of trees and a curved avenue. The architects
emphasised the tension between the two
languages. Many years were to pass before this
concept broke through and when it did it was in
Barcelona. 5
The eyes and mind of Europe were open
when Barcelona’s new City Council with mayor
Pasqual Maragall in the lead and ETSAB’s head,
architect Oriol Bohigas as leader of the newly
established practice, Servei de Projectes Urbans,
started a strong planning initiative which had
far-reaching effects. The planning can be seen as
the result of a board game, that signals a haphazard
natural order. As the architect Rafael Moneo
expressed it in connection with the exhibition
‘Architecture for Barcelona’ in 1978, ‘place your
bets, place your bets’. 6
At the end of the 1980’s and the beginning of
the 1990’s the concept was given visual expression
from Lyon to Copenhagen, when park planning
was seen as a result of sporadic impact
instead of being characterised by Modernism’s
green bands and wedges, and in detail in the
form of sloping slabs and tilted surfaces, glass
roofs and perforated steel, and edges and
spheres of white-painted concrete. The city park
in Vejle (Preben Skaarup, 1991) and the
Harbour Park on Islands Brygge in Copenhagen
(Annelise Bramsnæs, 1994) are some of the
successful examples.
Barcelona has powerful landscape characteristics:
mountain chains and rivers towards north,
west and east; sea, coast, harbours and beaches
towards the south. Villages and Roman ruins are
spun into the regular street network in Ildefonso
Cerdà’s Ensanche quarter from 1859 and the
whole is intersected by boulevards and avenues.
In Gracia, one of the villages Ensanche had swallowed
up, Gabriel Mora and Jaume Bach had the
task of refurbishing the squares Rius y Taulet,
Diamant, Virreina, Trilla, Raspall, Nord unificaciò,
Rovira and Sol. The cars were removed or
moved to underground car parks. The squares
were furnished with groves and rows of trees.
They were given new surfacing, lighting and
benches. Plaça del Sol (1980) particularly
attracted the attention of a Danish public. The
new horizontal floor adjusted to the original
sloping terrain with three steps; the rectangular
granite paving stones in different sizes and
nuances of grey, divided by bands with rougher
surfaces; the light mountings on high masts;
magnolia and plane trees planted in rows, and
the characteristic long, two-sided benches with
perforated backs were admired.
The closure of harbours, meat markets, factories,
workshops, railway sidings and gravel pits
made space available so that parks and squares
could be created with a special character.
The aim was to give the urban landscape its
dignity back and the strategy was to identify and
articulate some special places. Often there were
harbour areas whose function had changed and
contaminated land left by industry after it
Parc de Joan Mirò (Arriola, Quintana et al., 1981).
20 ’SCAPE 1 / 2006 1 / 2006 ’SCAPE 21
Photo: Frank Meyer
Plaça del Sol (Gabriel Mora and Jaume Bach, 1980).
Photo: Harry Harsema

The aim was to give the
urban landscape its dignity
back and the strategy was
to identify and articulate
some special places
Parc del Clot (Freixes & Miranda, 1982).
moved to the suburbs in the 1960’s. According
to the board game method the many regeneration
projects need not necessarily hang together,
but could be contrasted.
Council politicians, officers, architects and
landscape-architects flocked to Parc de Joan
Mirò on a site which had been a slaughterhouse
(Arriola, Quintana et al., 1981) to Parc del Clot,
where there had been a station, sidings and rail
tracks (Freixes & Miranda, 1982) and to Parc de
la Creueta del Coll in an old quarry on the
wooded Tibidabo mountain (Bohigas et al.,
1987).
Art and nature
In these parks a special language could be
studied that spoke of contrasts between the
straight and the curved, the worked and
unworked, the clear and the opaque, the
informative and the inspirational, the urban and
the rural, on the difference between culture and
nature.
New components that both activated and
provided for rest, decorated and told stories had
arrived. Lakes with rowing boats, grassy slopes
with jogging tracks, swimming and paddling
pools with fountains and waterfalls, old-fashioned
slatted park benches and modern long
benches; foot-bridges, amphitheatrical steps,
pergolas and glass half-roofs, white concrete
spheres and light towers, sculptures and
bollards, column-shaped cypresses;plane, fir and
palm groves planted systematically and hedges
and tress in rows in decreasing lengths. The
Photo: Harry Harsema
geometry was angled and curved, the directions
diagonal and right-angled. The compositions
were asymmetrical and layered, the tone often
humorous.
In Villa Cecilia’s garden (Torres Tur &
Lapeña, 1981), role-play between the artificial
and the natural was introduced. The correspondence
between art and nature manifested itself
in hedges with bold sweeping contours, stylised,
broken terrain curves, benches with wheels like
skateboards and lamps that resembled flower
petals blowing in the wind. Elias Torres Tur, one
of the architects, had studied with Charles
Moore, who in his turn had worked on landscape
architect Lawrence Halprins Lovejoy’s
fountain in Portland, Oregon, created precisely
in this dramatic language that plays with art and
nature.
Whilst squares in the inner city followed a
contextual language, Plaça dels Països Catalans,
the station square at Barcelona Sants, was different
(Helio Piñón and Albert Viaplana 1982 with
Enric Miralles as co-worker). In the plan its
outline is drawn as a triangle with a horizontal
base line and convex and concave sides. The
floor of pink rectangular granite slabs forms a
convex curve, highest in the centre. The components
are a quadratic, gently sloping perforated
steel roof supported by 16 tall thin poles each
resting on a small ‘pillow’. The square is
furnished with an s-shaped metal roof with thin,
round, shorter poles, seven benches that resemble
steps with a riser and two bases, a short and a
long, so one can lie down and sit up; a metal
espalier, a 25 meter long black-polished s-shaped
basalt granite bench, slanting metal bollards
with lights, steel spheres, pots with twining
plants, paper baskets, a slanting box with spotlights
and round metal tubes with water spouts.
All steel elements are painted steel grey. The
syntax is s-shaped curves, straight and slanting
lines.
At the end of the 1980’s it was thought that
the source had dried up after an over-consumption
that was close to abuse – but a new, pure
Modernism and a gardening and production
aesthetic broke through in the 1990’s as in Parc
de la Trinitat (Battle & Roig, 1989) at the motorway
junction between Trinitat Vella and Sant
Andreu, where the motorway, railway and electric
pylons from France are merged with the aid
of olive groves and fruit plantations, screens of
cypresses and poplar that continue out into the
landscape independent of the geometry of the
roads. The change from the mixed style, that
contained grid and meandering lines to
‘barcodes’ and sweeping curves have entered
the field and a re-discovery of a modern
language that values human production.
Folded surfaces
In an article in the journal ‘Science’ (1967),
the Polish-born mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot
asked ‘How long is the British Coast?’, wellknowing
that the coast has no well-defined
length. The more small bays and inlets one
includes, the longer it gets. He expressed this
condition mathematically by introducing the
concept of fractal dimensions, involving organisation
into systems consisting of small patterns
that repeat themselves, for example a bend in a
bend in a bend.
Mandelsbrot’s idea was that objects such as
coasts did not conform to ordinary geometry.
They are neither lines, which are one-dimensional,
or surfaces which are two-dimensional.
They can be in-between. The coast is almost a
flat, whole surface and therefore has a dimension
closer to two. A line that meanders whether
Villa Cecilia’s garden (Torres Tur & Lapeña, 1981).
Plaça dels Països Catalans (Helio Piñón and Albert Viaplana 1982 with Enric Miralles as co-worker).
22 ’SCAPE 1 / 2006 1 / 2006 ’SCAPE 23
Photo: Harry Harsema
Photos: Malene Hauxner

Jardin Botànic (Bet Figueras, Carlos Ferrater & Jose Luis Canosa, 1989).
Plaça del Mar (Olga Tarrasò, 1995).
as a zig-zag or in s-curves covers a corresponding
surface. A surface that is bent and folded
becomes a volume. A mountain chain has a fractal
dimension that lies between two and three
because it is a surface that manifests itself in
space. The same applies on a smaller scale. In
brief, if you fold surfaces you can make an infinite
number of volumes – a method that is used
in Barcelona in countless variations.
Around the turn of the century Montjuic
mountain in Barcelona was turned into an exhibition
space and a number of beautiful gardens
survive from that time which in spirit are Italian
Renaissance. Walls, steps, terraces and waterfalls
cultivate the slopes. Mies van de Rohe’s German
pavilion was rebuilt in 1986 at the foot of the
mountain on a shelf cut out by a strong horizontal
and vertical cut, just sufficient for one to walk
up a few steps and be protected at the back. On
the other climactically considered ‘good’ southwestern
side of the mountain is Jardin Botànic
(Bet Figueras, Carlos Ferrater & Jose Luis
Canosa, 1989), a botanical garden with Mediterranean
plants. Two buildings were intended to
be a herbarium, library, exhibition room, office,
service room, personnel locker, main entrance,
shop, ticket office and notice-boards.
Bet Figueras has folded the sloping site so
slanting cuts appear where there is a need for a
Photo: Malene Hauxner
This ‘supernature’ will
presumably characterise the next
decade – and Barcelona is still the
avant-garde
shelf for cultivation and traffic, and sealed them
with sheets of Corten steel. The folds can face in
or out, convex or concave. The walls are supplemented
with roofing plates and gateways and
buildings have appeared. The pattern of movement
between the 72 Mediterranean plant
groups from forest to wetland areas is indicated
by three meter wide main paths with a steep
lateral gradient and paths half as wide march off
to the sides and now and then lead to small
squares. The paths of 18 cm thick concrete
poured in situ are assembled with triangular,
overlapping boards. The gutters zig-zag down
the slopes as in vineyards. In some places the
path is cut into the slope, in other places it is
built on the outside. Water from the walls and
floor runs into a gutter. Drainage pipes under
the slabs take the water into a reservoir at the
bottom of the garden. The benches are folded
steel plates with four surfaces and three folds.
Architectural intervention
It probably began with Fossar de les Moreres
(Arriola & Fiol 1988). With the folded floor of
red tile a special language was introduced that
was later developed in the Parc del Mollinet
(Arriola & Fiol, 1987) in the suburban town
Badalona east of the river Besós. Here the tile
floor is laid in a herringbone pattern
surrounded by pergolas and a slightly lowerlying
gravel square with trees planted in a grid.
Parc Carrer del Madrid on the other side of the
road (Arriola & Fiol, 1989) consists of a sloping
grass lawn that is folded and flipped over a triangular
pattern. Since then another mountain
slope has been folded into a landscape for play
and movement, this time towards the north:
Parc Central de Nou Barris (Arriola & Fiol,
1997). The folding of Plaça de General
Moragues (Tarrasò, 1987) in one of Cerdà’s
quadrants that has been amputated by a railway
has the effect of making you look towards the sky
first – an architectural intervention that has
been brought to perfection along the coast,
most recently with the changes to the harbour
front in connection with the Forum 2004 exhibition.
It was incidentally also an effect le
Corbusier used at Chandigar, where he masked
Parc Plana Lledo (Enric Miralles, 1992)
the sight of grazing sheep to get closer to the
sky.
Where Plaça del Mar (Tarrasò & Henrich,
1995) now lies, there were once fish restaurants
with sand on the floors, bars and sports clubs
leading to a dirty beach and a polluted sea.
When the huts were demolished and the water
quality improved a charming milieu disappeared,
but a view to the water from Barcelona’s
side-streets was created, along with a bathing
beach and a promenade that finally became 1.8
km long.
Here is a small rhomboid square, whose floor
is lifted up in one corner and supported by
steps, with the effect that first you see the
primary lines – the sea’s horizon – and last the
life on the beach and other details. The difference
in level between Barcelona’s first promenade
and a new one has become a sloping
square in the same way.
In this new millennium the language and
significance has changed again. And once again
Enric Miralles and his practice, now continued
by Benedetta Tagliabue, are in the vanguard. In
the Parc Plana Lledo (Enric Miralles, 1992) a
marginalized site has been programmed to fill
both an urban, architectural and social space
24 ’SCAPE 1 / 2006 1 / 2006 ’SCAPE 25
Photo: Duccio Malagamba
between three city quarters. The solution has
become an ideal landscape put together with
biomorphic figures in a network of artificial
flowers, fruits, light and water in daring colours
like the graffiti of the quarters ‘A place where it
rains every morning – early’.
This ‘supernature’ will presumably characterise
the next decade – and Barcelona is still
the avant-garde in choice of language and significance.
1 Lund, Nils Ole, 1990. Den nordiske inspiration,, Arjkitekten
7/1990.
2 Mirailles,Enrik,1994. From what time is this place? Topos
8/1994.
3 A conversation with Enric Mirailles at Thomas Wiesner
SKALA 1985-1994. Pedersen, Carl, 1919. Stoflige virkninger,
Architecten and Pedersen, Carl, 1920. Modsætninger,
Architekten have been translated into English, French and
Italian.
4 Sestoft.Jørgen,1990. Kataloniens hovedstad. Arkitekten
7/1990.
5 Box 25 Architects,1978. Ayala Green Belt Park, Manila,
Philippines. Landskab 8/1978.
6 Moneo, Rafael,1978. Hagen juego, hagen juego. Architectura.
In: Manuel Ruisanchez Capelastegui. Laboratoriums
of urban development. Topos 1/1992.

Fourth European Biennale for Landscape Architecture
Inspiration of Barcelona
More entries, more participants, much industrial heritage and two winners again.
These are the first initial findings of the fourth Biennale for Landscape Architecture in
Barcelona. However, the Biennale is in particular a meeting of landscape architects from
all over Europe, with each other, and with that special town along the Catalan coast.
Harry Harsema
Dancing Spaniards in one of Barcelona's beautiful squares.
The exhibition area in the COAC Building where entries for the Rosa Barbra
Award were on display.
In Barcelona the public space is opening up.
On this sunny Sunday morning in March you
can see dozens of young and old people enjoying
being outside on a simple terrace at the
renowned Placa del Països Catalans. They are
playing, talking, reading, drinking, walking and
resting in this sometimes exuberant outside
space, which has been designed with care and
love. It is it not for nothing that Barcelona is still
regarded as the icon of contemporary public
space design. Of course, the climate is a stimulating
factor that much of social life takes place
in the public space. However, the freedom after
Franco, the pride in the city and the southern
social life and temperament also contributed to
the revival of the design, which already dates
back to a few decades. You can see that the landscape
architecture and urban development is
largely experienced and determined according
to the architecture. The abundant use of architectonic
forms and materials here, in the city of
Gaudi and Miro, is striking and obvious.
Day chairman Catherine Mosbach in conversation with Julian Raxworthy
(right) from Australia and Marcel van der Meijs of Dutch architects Juurlink +
Geluk.
It is more or less the end of the fourth Biennale
for Landscape Architecture, a four-day
meeting in Barcelona where landscape architects
from all over Europe will meet each other.
An inspiring meeting, in which I could participate
as a jury member. We came with a surprising
result for the Rosa Barba prize (see box).
Besides, there was a varied symposium, organised
by the French Catherine Mosbach, cowinner
of the last Biennale, and a presentation
of the International Bau Austellung in former
East-Germany. After this, Richard Styles, a representative
of the European Council of Landscape
Architecture Schools, reported about developments
at this European platform for educational
organisations, and the German publicist Lisa
Diedrich focused on the book Fieldwork, Landscape
Architecture Europe.
Steel and split
The theme of the first day of the Biennale was
the Rosa Barba prize. In a packed lecture room
Carme Pigem of RCR Arquitectes presents the winning design for Park
Piedra Tosca in Les Preses, Girona.
of one of the university buildings about four
hundred participants and students followed the
presentation of the ten finalists on Thursday
morning. When watching the ten presentations,
you came to the conclusion that this Biennale
mainly focused on transformation and the influence
of heritage.
For example, there was a building that was
designed for a Roman cooking place along the
Spanish Mediterranean Sea coast, a temple
made of heavy gabions, with mirroring access
doors, light shafts and a terrace. Impressive and
poetic. This also applied to the redesign of an
isolated geological park in Catalunya, with a
beautiful walking route and a reception room
dramatised in Corten steel. Or in Winterthur,
where an old steel industry complex was transformed
into a residential area, whereby the
designers limited themselves to using industrial
materials and form elements. Rails were left
intact and concrete surfaces processed with
metal grindings, so that beautiful pools are
26 ’SCAPE 1 / 2006 1 / 2006 ’SCAPE 27
Foto’s; Harry Harsema

Area for three Roman ovens, Vilassar de Dalt,
Spain. Design: Toni Gironès. The motive to make
this structure was the site of a Roman settlement
near the coast with three ovens was. Built up of
gabions, fitted with monumental, mirroring doors
and a terrace, the design looks like a temple.
Light shafts and materials provide an authentic
atmosphere.
Landscape Park Riem in München, Germany.
Design: Latitude Nord (Gilles Vexlard and Laurence
Vacherot). A large and impressive park, 210
hectares, at the former airport of Riem on the
eastern border of Munich. It includes: a large
terrace, a big swimming pool, a few wood strips,
meadows and a path structure based on the pattern
of former fields. The park, partly realised under the
denominator of the Bundesgartenschau in 2005,
was awarded the German landscape architecture
prize.
created after rain. Steel and split are dominant
in the public space, a few trees shoot from an
underground of metal.
The transformation of an old mining area in
the north of France still goes one step further.
Here a nature park has been developed in a
lagoon through a combination of water purification
and nature development. The water is clean
enough for swimming and nature offers many
opportunities to walk.
And there is also that large city park on the
southern border of Munich, with a view on the
Alps, where vast tree strips recall the disappeared
runways. How do you make such an area
accessible which at first was not accessible
because of its function? Which new function,
which new programme can be realised in an
abandoned area? How much recreation and
nature can Europe have? And how imperative is
the design in this case?
Formwill
You would think it is easier for designers of
concrete projects. Whether it involves an expansion
or redesign of cemeteries in Amsterdam
and Weiach, a covering of a big motorway along
the coast of Barcelona, a design of a school site
in Slovenia or a new residential area in Stuttgart
– it are unambiguous assignments. The fact that
they finished in the finale at the Biennale had to
do with the special solutions that nevertheless
were found.
Earlier the jury had selected the ten finalists
from only fifty of the submitted 450 projects.
The preselection had been done by the organisation
itself and therefore the jury itself as not
responsible. As a matter of fact, this task to judge
fifty projects in one day was already difficult
enough: how can you judge such a serious plan
in such a short period? Nevertheless, the jury
was beginning to sense that many things in the
European landscape architecture have become
very similar. Too much formwill, too much use of
fashionable materials such as Corten steel and
too many tricks with outside lightning.
However, the ten finalists came up with fine
entries, and we had great difficulties finding the
winner. We discussed the question whether we
should give a signal against the tendency that
there is an insufficient distinction in European
landscape architecture in finding unique, placebound
and well-considered solutions with an
international power of expression. Perhaps the
winner should be a small-scale and one-dimensional
project that possesses this exceptional
quality in perfection. Like that project with
those Roman ovens. But is that project part of
landscape architecture?
Respect
With the final decision to nominate two projects
as a winner the jury wanted to initiate this
discussion. This decision can be regarded as a
statement. The fact that the discussion on the
relation between architecture and landscape
architecture is an extra sensitive issue in
Barcelona is clear: the study of landscape architect
is not an independent study, but a postgraduate
course at the architecture college.
The one winning project, Park Piedra Tosca in
Les Preses, Girona, Spain, was praised for the
extraordinary way in which the designers had
opened up the volcano landscape literally and
figuratively. On the one hand detached, by only
removing some things or by doing nothing at all,
on the other hand by giving meaning and power
of expression to the landscape through a powerful
intervention. Some jury members thought it
was asocial and aristocratic, not a landscape
where a family would eat tapas in a hot summer,
that it perhaps was land art... But most found it
Lagoon of Harnes, France. Design: Paysages, David Verport. In total 17.5 hectares of a former mining area was
redesigned through nature development and water purification. The result is a regional water park with a
large biodiversity, including a natural swimming pool. A few old bunkers have been saved.
Katharina Schulzer Square in Winthertur, Switzerland. Design: Vetsch Nipkow Partner AG.
A redesign of an industry complex in a contemporary district, based on features of the old
steel industry. A consistent application of materials and forms, which has been carried out
with a great sense for aesthetics, creates a daring, completely individual, applicable
atmosphere.
28 ’SCAPE 1 / 2006 1 / 2006 ’SCAPE 29

Site around the primary school Ob Rinzi in Kocevje, Slovenia. Design: Ana Kucan.
˘
The landscape design (3.5 hectares) conforms with the undulating,
wood-like environment in a beneficent informal way, and fully takes advantage of this environment. A few open playing places have been added,
without disturbing the atmosphere of the wood. There is a great strong relationship between inside and outside.
Expansion of the cemetery De Nieuwe Ooster in Amsterdam. Design: Karres en Brands landschapsarchitecten.
The 33-hectare large expansion forms a contrast with the old cemetery of the famous
Dutch garden architect Leonard Springer. The tight strips, derived from a bar code, offer a large
range of options for contemporary burying. Striking elements in this rich design are a large pond
and a special urn wall.
Scharnhauser Park at Stuttgart, Germany.
Design: Wolfrum+Janson Architektur+Stadtplanung.
Construction of part of the town of 140
hectares on a hill that is orientated to the south,
partly on an old encampment, with a prominent
role for a kind of avenue, which is built up of
terraces. These imposing stairs form a characteristic
and supporting public space, with a view on the
Schwabian hills.
Passeig de Garcia Fària, Barcelona, Spain.
Design: Ravetllat/Ribas, arquitectes. This partial
roofing of the busy coastal road offers a real
solution to a real problem. Underground parking
facilities are being built, as well as space for
parading and jogging at this alternative
boulevard, with a view across the sea.
Expansion of the cemetery of Weiach, Switzerland. Design: Kuhn Truninger Landschaftsarchitekten. A current addition of 1.7 hectare, with a
remarkable semi-transparent fencing of larch that fits in well with the old walls around the church and recalls the use of fences around
orchards. With graphical lines on gravestones a relation with the old cemetery is established. A fountain and a few trees complete this subtle
and serene work.
so good and so loving in revealing the beauty of
a landscape.
The other winning project, the Harnes
Lagune in the north of France, was the only
project with a more regional significance, which
also had an emphatic ‘green’ solution through
the combination of nature development and
water management. At the same time the
cultural component, or in other words, the
content of architecture is not very present. Why
not make nature development and the redesign
of a mining area visible as a cultural act? On the
other hand some state that it should be
respected when this is not done. In the end the
implementation and temptation of the perspective
for larger parts of France, Belgium and the
Netherlands was convincing, where similar problems
exist - nature development as the future.
Yes, that temple for the Roman ovens could
not be considered as landscape architecture. It
was hardly embedded in the environment: the
inaccessible location along the sea was clouded
by the maladjusted environment of new housing.
The stairs of the Scharnhauserpark remained
too much a means of design of urban development,
the rigid design of the Kathrarine
Schulzer Platz was not sufficiently convincing in
the combination of freedom, memory and
hospitality. And with this fine expansion in
Weiach the jury wondered whether it was not too
much a stylised translation of history and the
environment, and too little an intimate place
where you could take your loved ones.
Bronze elements
The expansion of De Nieuwe Ooster cemetery
in Amsterdam also raised doubts. The designers
suggest that their design would create a freedom
when burying a person. But what else is there to
choose than one of the strips, which in terms of
the design represent one of the lines of the bar
code from which the expansion was built up?
Was the rigid application of this device incompatible
with the desired freedom, despite the
surprising completeness of the design? It could
be that differences in the culture of burying in
Europe play a role here.
The French approach to the design for the
Riempark was also regarded to be a bit technocratic
and arrogant in the end. Although the
park had a remarkable size and the approach
was impressive, why was it necessary to indicate
the coordinates of the site in bronze elements
on the world map? Why so many concrete lines,
borders and stairs? Is this a park that will make
you feel at ease? The majority of the jury kept
their doubts. And these doubts continued to last
a whole evening and a whole night. Only in the
course of Friday morning the final judgment was
given, the ex aequo, although it was not
supported by the entire jury. And we had really
intended to choose one winner.
On Friday evening the public therefore
started to shout in protest after the result had
been announced in two languages by jury chairman
Paolo Bürgi. This despite the fact that the
was remarkably similar to the public result: the
winner there was the Lagoon of Harnes, second
place for the Park Piedra Tosca, and third place
for De Nieuwe Ooster.
Big trees
There was much more to experience at this
Biennale. Like the sometimes confusing but also
fascinating conference organised by Catherine
Mosbach for Friday – which made it clear that
the Biennale can gain character and substance
by establishing a kind of curatorship.
For example, the contribution of the botanist
Claude Figureau who investigated the prevalence
and development of all kinds of fungi, mosses
30 ’SCAPE 1 / 2006 1 / 2006 ’SCAPE 31

Park Piedra Tosca.
Lagoon of Harnes, France.
Park Piedra Tosca in Les Preses, Girona, Spain. Design: RCR Aranda, Pigem Vilalta, arquitectes. Special and
almost artistic impulse for a geological park of volcanic stone, on the one hand because of proposals for smallscale
agricultural recycling, on the other hand by designing a route through the area with a few special
‘reception rooms’ made of Corten steel. Minor interventions that reveal the beauty of the area.
and other microbiological species was intriguing
– but what was the significance for landscape
architecture? The abundance of forms? The
finding that much biological life has disappeared
from our cities and villages? What can we do with
the finding that species from Asia and Africa
carried under a person’s shoes may end up in
Lyon? Mosbach states that she herself could
never have made the prize winning project of the
Botanic Garden in Bordaux without the intellectual
interference of Figureau. Landscape architects
should be more open to contributions from
other disciplines.
The variation in the programme was great. For
example, the Danish landscape architect Stig
Andersson showed a few of his projects, with
playful and creative and high-tech solutions for
nature in the current city, including sound
effects of thunder and water and including light
effects, whereby shadows suggested the presence
of large trees.
And what should we think about the video in
which mankind shows its destructive force: burning
landscapes, bodies, destruction. Hereby the
story of Juurlink and Geluk about their designs
for the Dutch city landscape was rather lighthearted.
The Australian landscape architect
Julian Lexworthy showed his interest in building
with nature, as done by a number of Dutch architects
and landschape architects, using old
concrete as well as straight 'artificial' lines in the
design.
Mosbach wants to make things more profound
and broaden them. That she used the denominator
‘landscape as product, landscape as
production’ seems a little noncommittal in hind-
sight. And with questions from the public such
as ‘why aren’t there any women in the panel’, or
‘why can’t landscape architects work in Spain
without the title of architect’ the discussion did
not make much progress. The fact that the
discussion on the relationship between architecture
and landscape architecture is extra sensitive
in Barcelona is obvious. For example, many
landscape architects disagree that the study of
landscape architect is not an independent study,
but a postgraduate course at the architecture
college.
During the final debate on Saturday morning
Rosa Barba was quoted: ‘Beyond architecture
there is landscape’. It is a statement of which the
significance only becomes clear after a while. It
The Rosa Barba Prize and the European Prize for Urban Public Space
In 1998, two initiatives were started
parallel with the other in the Catalan
capital, without the two being aware
of each other: the important cultural
centre CCCB prepared a show named
‘The reconquest of public space in
Europe’, including the edition of a
Public Space Award and, parallel with
the ETSAB architecture school, created
a professional congress on European
landscape architecture - together with
the Catalan architects’ chambernamed
‘Biennal the paisatge’, which is
further edited every two years. Looking
back, it was as if an epoch ended
and another one started this very year
in Barcelona. It was as if the show
closed the heroic period of new public
spaces created by Catalan architects,
and as if the Biennal opened the era of
Catalan landscape architecture as a
new issue for creating public spaces,
territories, and environments. At the
launch of the CCCB-powered Prize for
Urban Public Space, city architect Oriol
Bohigas qualified landscape architecture
as ‘being a decorative profession
for women’, surely smelling the emerging
competition of others. At the first
Biennal many landscape architects
from all over Europe shared the feeling
shows a compassion, which is expressed even
more explicitly in the idea that, when you fell a
tree, you also destroy the soil ‘in’ the tree.
Squares
It is Saturday late in the evening when we are
sitting at the Placa Real and drinking wine and
grappa – a summer spring evening, music, many
people, palms, fountains. We are discussing the
difference with the Netherlands, the fact that
almost everything there is made of landscape as
a result of the topographical, more pliable
conditions, and the discipline of architecture
therefore has other roots and perspectives than
in Spain, where other ambitions and motives
dominate as a result of other conditions and the
of attending the birth of a new Catalan
movement full of spirit and the
serious wish to exchange experiences
with professionals all over Europe.
The Biennal proved to be a vivid and
serious laboratory of European landscape
architecture, strategically very
important for the Catalan and Spanish
landscape architects in their struggle
for the recognition of the title, and at
the same time totally opening up to
the European professional world. The
fourth edition, between 23 and 26
March of this year, attracted more than
three hundred participants from all
over Europe. They could feed upon
symposia, exhibitions, excursions and
presentations. A central part is the
European Prize in Landscape Architecture
Rosa Barba, named after one of
the founders of the biennale. Rosa
Barba was a prominent landscape
architect in Barcelona. She died in
2000, shortly after the first edition.
With recent projects from the last
four years more than 450 entrants
from all over Europe competed for the
first place and a sum of 15,000 Euro.
This number of entries was almost
fifty percent more than with the last
edition. The main supplier is Spain
with 45 percent (of which 75 percent
from Catalonia). In addition, Portugal,
Switzerland, France, the Netherlands
and Germany are also strongly represented.
Chairman of the jury for the Rosa
Barba prize was Paolo Bürgi from
Switzerland, one of the two winners of
the previous edition. The jury included
Theresa Andresen from Portugal, chairman
of the European Federation of
Landscape Architects (EFLA), Marc
Claramunt from France, editor of the
magazine Pages Paysages, Harry
Harsema, producer of the magazines
Blauwe Kamer and ’scape, and Sara
Bartumeus, Ramón Pico and Joan Roig
from Spain. Bartumeus was part of the
organisation, while Pico won the
public prize last time.
The European Prize for Urban Public
Space will also be awarded this year,
also for the fourth time. In the meanwhile
this initiative is organised in
cooperation with several architecture
centres in Europe, like those in Vienna,
London, Paris and Rotterdam. The prize
is awarded to designers and clients.
The Public Space Prize and the Biennale
are still two separate entities. For
traditionally strong input of architecture.
Like at this square. The trees at the Placa Real
are placed in squares which have been cut away
in the natural stone floor. They lie deeply, which
is probably easy for the water supply. In addition,
the stone floor has a powerful expression, plain,
without superfluous details. This square in its
current form is also the result of the revival that
placed Barcelona on the map as an international
focus of (landscape) architecture. There is still
much to learn, although a few people grumbled
that the quality of the public space was declining.
Maintenance and vulnerability: perhaps that
would be a good subject for the next Biennale.
example, Aron Betsky, director of the
Rotterdam Architecture Institute NAi
and co-organiser of the Public Space
Prize, does not know about the Biennale.
And on the other hand: during
the Biennale the Public Space Prize
was no topic at all.
Betsky refers to the Public Space
Prize as something especially for
southern countries, where there is a
much greater interest in the public
space. This is proved by the submissions
and the results. Landscape architecture
is participating now – nevertheless
the words of Bohigas – even
male landscpae architects. This is
evident from the results of the last
edition in 2004: the (shared) first prize
was awarded for a landscape development
plan for a refuse dump, designed
by the Catalan architects Battle @
Roig, while DS Landschapsarchitecten
from the Netherlands received a
honourable mention for the design for
the Tilla-Durieux park in Berlin.
The award for 2006 will be
announced in June.
www.coac.net/landscape/
www.urban.cccb.org
32 ’SCAPE 1 / 2006 1 / 2006 ’SCAPE 33

Environment and tradition pay
the price for change
The giant scale model of Shanghai.
Higher, bigger, faster in China
The political and economic transformation of China is fuelling an unprecedented
growth of its cities. China has opted to adopt a Western model of urban development.
Western architects and planners are being hired to replace its old districts with copies
of European urbanism, often including spectacular high-rise buildings. But despite
breaking all records, new problems loom large on the horizon. Will it be possible to
run an Olympic marathon through the smog-filled streets of Beijing in 2008?
Hank van Tilborg
34 ’SCAPE 1 / 2006 1 / 2006 ’SCAPE 35
Photos: Alex Sievers en Hank van Tilborg
Next to the People’s Park in the heart of
Shanghai stands the Urban Planning Exhibition
Hall, a rather insignificant five-story building in
this city of skyscrapers. The only eye-catching
feature are the four steel structures on the roof
that represent magnolias in bloom – the city
flower. Once inside the building the real spectacle
unfolds: a large 1:500 scale model of the city
covering dozens of square metres. With its thousands
of high-rise buildings seemingly dotted at
random throughout the city, the model reveals a
bizarre reality that outstrips the logic of West
European city planning. China is hot. The attention
devoted to China by the European media
might seem somewhat exaggerated, but in fact it
receives too little coverage for a country that is
rapidly becoming a global economic powerhouse.
On its route to the top it looks specifically
to Europe for inspiration rather than the
United States. Europe is now a more important
trading partner for China than America.
Shanghai is a good illustration of China’s
precipitous growth. Its port, once known as the
Paris of the East, is now its economic heart.
Shanghai is the fastest growing city in China’s
fastest growing region. After a period of hibernation
during the Communist regime, the city
gradually reawakened during the 1980s. Development
picked up rapidly in the early 1990s and
has really taken off over the last few years. In
1843 Shanghai had 250,000 inhabitants, rising to
about three million in 1930, but now the city is
home to more than twenty million people, about
the same as Beijing. Two years ago Shanghai
took Rotterdam’s crown as the largest port in
the world. Five of the ten biggest ports in the
world are in China.
New face
Shanghai’s business district, Pudong, was still
farmland in 1992. Anting new town, a satellite
city of Shanghai, was just a farming village seven
years ago. Five years ago Volkswagen established
a presence there, followed shortly by General
Motors, and in a short time the town has become
the Detroit of Asia. Formula One Grand Prix
races have been held there for two years on a
race track built in just nine months.
China is eager to present itself to the outside
world as a new economic superpower. The 2008
Olympic Games are being organised by Beijing
and two years later Shanghai will host the World
Expo. In preparation for the World Expo 2010
work began recently on the Xizang tunnel under
the river Huangpu. It was designed to relieve
pressure on the existing river crossings in the
city, particularly the Nanpu and Lupu bridges.
The Olympic Games and the World Expo are the
motors behind many new construction projects.
China wants impressive and striking new archi-

Labourers at work on the outdoor areas of the Two Bay City project.
View of Pudong. Left, the Oriental Pearl Radio & TV tower; right, the 420 metre high Jin
Mao tower.
tecture to present a new face to the world and is
hiring Western designers to work with local
architects to achieve this aim. The new office
building for Chinese state television in Beijing,
designed by Rem Koolhaas, will be a major new
landmark in the city. In Shanghai the tallest
building in the world, at 539 metres, is currently
under construction right next to the Jin Mao
tower, which at 420 metres is currently the tallest
building in Shanghai. The 53rd to 87th storeys
of the Jin Mao tower house a hotel with a lobby
atrium that runs right up to the top of the building,
making it the highest hotel with the largest
lobby in the world.
Planters
Shanghai is breaking one record after
another. The new South Station, currently being
built to a design by the French firm AREP, has
the largest clear span glass canopy in the world.
The Siemens ‘floating’ train that links the city
with the international airport – and later the
Expo site – carries its passengers at a speed of
430 kilometres per hour. The train hardly has
time to reach top speed before it arrives at its
destination. This magnetic levitation train takes
just seven minutes to cover the thirty kilometres
from the city centre to Shanghai International
Airport.
The new Two Bay City district in Shanghai.
Every month the number of cars in Shanghai
rises by 2500 to 5000, aggravating the already
huge problems of congestion. The city is avidly
investing in new infrastructure, including public
transport, and in new public green space. To
green the city, rows of planters have been hung
on kilometres-long stretches of vehicle safety
fences along the urban motorways. The number
of parks in Shanghai has also increased from
about 50 to more than 250 in recent years:
according to official figures 35 per cent of the
city now consists of green space. One of the
recently created parks is Yanan Green Space, to
the west of the city centre, which incorporates
Tianshan park. Several new parks nestle in and
around an interchange on the inner ring road,
surrounded by flyovers and linked together by
an elevated pedestrian route. This creative
example of intensive land use gives rise to an
almost surrealistic image of people looking for a
place to relax, hold a quiet conversation, prac-
tice t’ai chi or play a game all within a stone’s
throw of the hurtling traffic.
For West European companies the question is
no longer how to compete with China from their
home base in Europe, but whether they dare to
invest in China and establish a presence there in
a bid not to miss the boat. After Germany, the
Netherlands is the second biggest European
investor in China, with more than three
hundred companies in Shanghai alone. These
are no longer just manufacturing companies,
but also businesses active in more knowledgeintensive
sectors. Philips has thirty-six factories
in China, and this will rise to more than seventy
in a few years time.
Tiny homes
The explosive rate of growth in China
depends largely on its enormous labour pool.
The 800 million or so Chinese peasants still in
the countryside are a vast source of cheap
A dying tradition: tai chi in the open air.
Jian Wai Soho, the new business district of Beijing.
Traditional alleyway district.
36 ’SCAPE 1 / 2006 1 / 2006 ’SCAPE 37

Yanan Green Space.
labour. They can easily be tempted to move to
the cities where wages and living standards are
higher. Neither does China have a shortage of
hard working, entrepreneurial and independently-minded
people. Besides their own families
and friends, money is high on most people’s list
of priorities. It is quiet normal for these workers
to live literally on the building site, in barracks,
and move on to the next site when the work is
finished. Building is a continuous process: in
Beijing and Shanghai the sound of construction
can be heard ringing out from the brightly lit
sites throughout the night.
The rapid changes taking place in China are
going hand in hand with a major social
upheaval. The old districts in the big cities, the
hutongs in Beijing and the lilongs in Shanghai,
are being swept away and replaced by new developments.
In these alleyway districts, with their
tightly-knit social and economic networks, the
houses are grouped around patios and courtyards
linked together by narrow alleys. Much of
the social life in these districts takes places
outdoors. For many of the inhabitants these
close social networks make the primitive conditions
in these crowded districts – with their tiny
living quarters which often lack private toilet
facilities – far more preferable to the comforts of
the anonymous high-rise flats. But this is not
reflected in the government-controlled media.
In the Shanghai Daily you will find only gushing
praise for the new developments being built for
the 2010 World Expo, while more than ten thousand
families are being evicted from their homes
to make way for them. The censors do not allow
open criticism of these projects for ‘progress
and improvement’.
Faceless cities
The West is the model for progress. Fashion is
Western; even the billboards are dominated by
white Western models. In the new China,
customs and traditions hardly seem to matter
anymore. The old ways, such as practising t’ai
chi on the street or in the park before work, are
still followed by the older generations, but are of
little interest to the younger generation. Even
traditional Chinese architecture and town planning
seem to have been marginalised. Architects
are flown in from Europe to design whole new
districts on the Western model.
In taking this route China is not doing justice
to its own rich architectural tradition. This disregard
for China’s own values and customs – its
people’s very identity – is threatening to disrupt
the social fabric. Beijing and Shanghai are
already being called ‘faceless cities’, and the first
calls have been made to preserve a few alleyway
districts for posterity. In this respect the growing
tourist industry in China’s main cities may be
their salvation. Besides excursions to the Forbidden
City and Tiananmen Square (Gate of Heavenly
Peace), a visit to Beijing is not complete
without a tour of one of the alleyway districts,
where new tourist bars are springing up all the
time. Paradoxically enough, transforming a
traditional alley into a street full of bars may just
be the way to save the hutong. There is also
increasing interest in the more recent heritage,
as evidenced by the NEW 798 area in Beijing.
This industrial complex, built in the 1950s by
the Russians and designed by East German
architects in the Bauhaus style, was on the list for
clearance. However, in 2002 the area was taken
over by a group of artists and is now a lively
neighbourhood of galleries, studios, restaurants
and cafes. The communist slogans of the period
– ‘Long Live Chairman Mao’ – which cover the
walls throughout the complex are a tangible
reminder of China’s history and form a striking
backdrop to the contemporary works of art.
Chinese toys
It is remarkable how quickly the Chinese have
put their own stamp on the building boom. The
building projects completed in Beijing and
Shanghai a few years ago are still marred by
Zhu Jia Jiao, or Cambridge Watertown.
numerous flaws. At first sight they seem to be
quite impressive reproductions, but closer
inspection reveals the failings of the builders.
The detailing in a project like Sa Na Wei La Villa
Park, a gated community designed by the
Chinese firm Turenscape, is well below standard.
The drainage is poorly designed throughout, as
if it was decided to add the drainpipes at the last
minute when construction was already well
underway – a defect that also plagues the previously
mentioned Anting district. The buildings
in Sa Na Wei La Villa Park are also aging quickly.
The development is rather like a Chinese toy: it
looks attractive at first sight, but does not stand
up well to heavy use.
The projects now under construction, though,
are up to the same standard as new buildings in
Europe. The phase of minor but nevertheless
obtrusive flaws is over, and the building designs
are particularly well suited to their environment.
In the German theme town of Anting, in the
area surrounding the new South Station and in
the new Zhu Jia Jiao district (Cambridge Water
Town) near Shanghai no expense has been
spared on the public spaces. The outdoor areas
have been carefully designed using high quality
materials (brick pavers, Chinese granite setts)
Sa Na Wei La Villa Park.
38 ’SCAPE 1 / 2006 1 / 2006 ’SCAPE 39

and large numbers of very big trees. Of course,
the low labour costs free up resources to pay for
all this – and growing on nursery stock is
cheaper in China – but it is also a question of
setting priorities. The fact that the first residents
only move in once all the homes and the
outdoor areas are ready is proof that a well
designed public realm is a valued attribute.
Floods
It seems, therefore, that China hardly needs
Europeans any more to build an attractive residential
district, station or station area. The question,
then, is whether the Western architectural
Scale model of the design for Anting.
Anting New Town, by the German architect Albert Speer Junior.
40 ’SCAPE 1 / 2006
firms active on the Chinese market would not do
better to concentrate on the really pressing
issues. Instead of importing chocolate-box urban
compositions from Europe, such as Dutch canal
towns and German Siedlungen, Western consultants
could help solve China’s burgeoning environmental
problems – the dark side to its
riotous growth.
One such problem is the rapidly rising mobility,
along with serious air pollution and water
supply problems. One in four Chinese has to
make do with drinking water polluted by China’s
dirty industries. Each year people are killed by
floods. This presents an enormous challenge,
and Western European architects and engineers
have a reputation in this area. Appearance,
impressions and image dominate the Chinese
way of thinking; issues like sustainable water
management and ecological values are much
less important. Individualism in Chinese society
still stands in the way of an energetic approach
to solving such collective problems. The heavy
hand of the state and the ban on private ownership
of land, however, do present some opportunities
in this regard. Air pollution is a serious
problem – so important that it is questionable
whether it would be responsible to hold a
marathon in Beijing in 2008. When the city
received the Olympic Committee the factories
were shut down for four days. There are even
rumours that the grass was cleaned and painted
to make the best possible impression on the
delegates. But it will not be long before the environmental
problems can no longer be brushed
aside and will start to impede further growth.
That is the challenge facing China, not building
the highest tower or the biggest hotel lobby.
German Anting
Anting is not just a car manufacturing
city but a residential centre as
well. When completed, this new town
will be home to fifty thousand people.
The residential area was designed on
the German model by Albert Speer
and Partners and the Stuttgart landscape
architect David Elsworth.
Inspired by the Weimar Republic, and
with a nod toward the characteristic
use of colour by, among others, the
architect Taut in the well-known
Berlin Siedlung Uncle Tom’s Hütte,
Speer’s firm have given this new
Chinese housing development a
German ambience.
The satellite development Anting is
a fifty square kilometres area used for
production, trade, exhibition, education,
management, tourism, entertainment,
a Formula 1 racetrack and
dwellings for 50.000 residents.
The designers used typically Western
principles as multifunctional
block structures, public open spaces
and pedestrian-friendly streets for
the masterplan. In the centre the
building blocks are five storeys, the
more residential areas to the east and
the west are four and three storeys.
Albert Speer and Partners tried to put
in environmental and sustainable
technologies. In China Anting is one
of the first new towns where quality
standards and resource efficiency
played a role.