Landscape Architecture: Landscape Architecture: - School of ...

Gross. Max, Garden for a Plant Collector at the House for an Art Lover, Glasgow, Scotland, 2005–
View of the Garden for a Plant Collector at dusk.
are commanding the strongest, yet most aggravated, force
there is – bar the markets – to play a leading role in
contemporary society.
Added to this, recent climate change in Europe (the green
open spaces of London’s parks were reduced to scorched earth
as the city went Mediterranean in the summer of 2006, and
world-standard UK wine-growing became a hot prospect for
the future) has not only prompted future opportunities for
radical changes in the ways buildings are constituted, as
ecosystems. It has also led to urban environmental novelties
such as urban (Paris) and tropical indoor (Berlin) beaches, and
year-round indoor ski slopes with ‘real snow’ (Scotland).
For the Edinburgh-based landscape architecture practice
Gross.Max, narrative is a vital component of contemporary
landscapes. ‘We like extremes, otherwise the whole world
becomes lookalike,’ says Eelco Hooftman, who founded the
practice with Bridget Baines in the Scottish capital in 1995. The
firm first attracted public attention for its informal
landscaping of the Bullring, Birmingham’s central shopping
area, in 2003, and has since completed schemes for Zaha
Hadid’s BMW plant in Leipzig, Germany, and the public spaces
at the refurbished Royal Festival Hall in London. Though as yet
still relatively unknown even within the architectural world,
Gross.Max has injected an optimistic breeze of fresh air and
exuberance into UK urban design. For the architects’ proposed
environment for the House for an Art Lover, Glasgow, an
unbuilt MacKintosh project that a Glaswegian group recently
determined to make real for the first time, they presented the
client with a book of computer-generated imagery focused on
Des Esseintes, the fictional protagonist of JK Huysmans’
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