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

Mosbach Paysagistes, Le Jardin Botanique de Bordeaux (Botanical Garden of Bordeaux): stage 1 (garden),
2001–02; stage 2 (museum and greenhouses), 2004–05
On a site adjacent to Bordeaux’s Garonne River, on its left bank, the thin wedge (600 x 70 metres/1,969 x 230 feet) of
botanic gardens is in the centre of an urban redevelopment project by Dominique Perrault. The brief was to create a
botanic garden exhibiting the particular characteristics of the natural and cultural character of the Aquitaine bioregion,
something Mosbach Paysagistes has fused as a powerful dialectic in the form of a public landscape.
decadent novel Against Nature (1903) and a plant lover who
tends a glasshouse of rare specimens. The 150-page book
bursts with proposals for ‘a heterotopia of plants blurring the
boundary between the natural and the artificial’.
Hooftman wants landscape architecture to return to
experimentation on the level it reached in 17th- and 18thcentury
Britain, radically reshaping nature according to fashion
and taste as dandies, hermits and poets were liable to do.
Such a revival, he feels, is especially necessary after a period
grossly lacking in landscape design creativity at the end of the
late 20th century, when it became a mere afterthought tacked
on to the end of the construction process. Smaller cultural
projects, such as the House for an Art Lover and the vertical
garden against a blank wall near Tower Bridge in London the
practice is completing for the American artist Mark Dion,
offer valuable opportunities to intervene in the public realm.
Landscape design as the ‘physical and rational
manipulation of an objectified reality’ is already intrinsic to
Dutch urban design, borne of the need to create
comprehensive and efficient use through polders and dykes of
land below sea level. ‘In the Netherlands there is the idea that
you can make land, make nature, which explains our
grassroots politics,’ says Hooftman. ‘We are about a new
picturesque.’ Pressing him on what that is, he answers that:
‘It’s just the old, reinvented. We still believe in aesthetics.’
Which explains the kinship between Gross.Max and Zaha
Hadid, for whose intensely wrought aesthetics Gross.Max has
completed a number of successful landscape schemes. For her
new 200-hectare (494-acre) BMW site in Leipzig, its landscape
architecture, inspired by agricultural landscapes, combines a
response to the radical nature of Hadid’s architecture,
functional use of the site and ecological considerations. A row
of ‘accelerating trees’ planted increasingly close together
along the side of the car park provides orientation and a
dynamism to this normally mundane environment.
Hooftman believes that landscape architecture can serve as a
testing ground for urbanism. Society’s colonisation of
landscape is a complex phenomenon, and now the bigger
developers are coming to see art and architecture as a
commodity, which encourages a contextual approach to
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