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

flourish. This is evident in the design of a number of new urban
parks, for example, making them characterful yet culturally
porous urban additions rather than merely generic backdrops
to buildings. Gross.Max’s terraced Rottenrow Gardens, for
Glasgow’s Strathclyde University, fulfils this role, functioning as
the outdoor social centre of the university for students and
staff, and a hub in a network of routes linking the campus.
In France, a radical reinvention of the hitherto largely
hermetic archetypical typology of the botanic garden was
undertaken in 2002 by Catherine Mosbach, of Mosbach
Paysagistes, for the district of Bordeaux on the right bank of
the Garonne River. Instead of creating a hermetic garden or a
public park, Mosbach has forged a new hybrid of urban
parkland overlaying the historic grid of the agricultural land
of the La Bastide district here and the old downtown area on
the left bank. Her design includes a water garden, an
environmental ‘gallery’ of botanic and agricultural landscapes
laid out in a field of wide strips the public is free to wander
through and study – the ecological part of the project – and
an ethnobotanic field of crops on long irrigated strips of land.
A fourth element is a neighbourhood garden for new housing.
The first is a geometric space planted with aquatic species
set above the adjacent road. The gallery is an overly artificial
cross section of the Aquitaine Basin region’s natural
classifications – sand dune, water and dry meadows, oak
woodlands, heath and limestone – yet they bring the reality of
the region to this urban site. Botanic gardens mostly try to
outdo each other with exotic species, but this one plays a
different game, promoting landscape as cultural heritage.
Mosbach describes her vision as a philosophical rather than an
ecological one, using natural flows to draw human movement.
Her largest urban project to date has been a new 7-
kilometre (4 1 / 3 -mile) long walkway along the canal of St Denis
from La Villette to the island of St Denis in Paris, and she is
currently developing the park for the Louvre’s new regional
museum at Lens in Nord-Pas-de-Calais (a group of nine
buildings) on a 20-hectare (40-acre) site, together with
Japanese architects SANAA and New York museum designers
Imrey Culbert. An open relationship between the museum,
nature and the landscape will be achieved through a circuit
taking visitors out of the buildings and along glazed paths
winding through a clearing. Jack Lang, the former French
Minister of Culture, has described the scheme as ‘a project
that starts from the earth and reaches for the stars’.
Dutch urban designers and landscape architects West 8, led
by founder Adriaan Geuze, established its reputation in the
1990s with projects at home – the Rotterdam
Schouwburgplein and, more recently, the Borneo Sporenburg
docklands development in Amsterdam. The best known of the
younger generation of landscape architects, the practice, in
stepping aside from the age-old opposition between city and
nature in favour of their fusion, has a disciplined, contextbased
methodology. This underlies a frequently surreal,
heterogeneous and often humorously tongue-in-cheek
The water garden is an irregular grid of basins
separated by paved walkways.