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

The recent work of Beigel and Christou has developed through
the research they carried out for an experimental project for a
site in eastern Germany, at Cospuden, close to Leipzig. The
purpose of the Second Nature Landscape project was to lay out
a carpet of specifically landscape terrain, as a kind of generator
of form, so providing the basis for an emergent architectural
landscape – laying out the rug, but not the picnic.
Research was carried out into the evident natural and
occupational memory traces offered by the landscape,
ranging from its geological origins, through prehistoric times
and primitive 17th-century flood preventive schemes and the
l8th-century manor house and estate that developed, to the
despoliation of all this as a result of large-scale coal-mining
operations. Now the rug contains an overlay of incipient
ecological measures. The deep scars of the open-cast mining
are being flooded, which over the next 30 years will permit
the formation of a postindustrial city on a recreational lake –
a city of dreams.
In a purely landscape reclamation context one is reminded
of Geoffrey Jellicoe’s 50-year-long project for the Hope Cement
Works in Derbyshire, England, in the Peak District there. But
ambitions at Leipzig embrace a whole city scheme. The
extreme horizontality of the new landscape opens many
possibilities, which Beigel and Christou have envisioned and
to which the Leipzig authorities have given their support.
The site stretches over a 50-kilometre (31-mile) radius south
of Leipzig and will eventually be transformed into a postindustrial,
recreational, city lake landscape. The Cospuden
project has become a prototype design for the meanings of
the new lakes and for the different ways the city is
approaching its new lake shores – the revalidation of so-called
‘emptied sites’ in the words of ARU.
A long, straight lake includes promenades and the
retention of the straight edges of the coal-dust protection
forests planted at right angles to the dams. The plan
designated the soft lake shore as a wilderness and the straight
shore as the new urban terrain, having a hard edge.
This is, as a whole, an ecological terrain which has now
become an urban wetland, but it is crossed with care by a
timber jetty. The wetland acts as a catchment field, part of a
surface-water management strategy in which the relatively
unclean surface water flowing down the sloping suburban
territories towards the new lake is retained separately from
the clear groundwater of the lake itself.
The project as a whole could be described as a landscapescale
architectural infrastructure that will provide a spatial
framework for buildings in the future.
Architecture Research Unit, Second Nature Landscape, Cospuden, Leipzig,
Germany, ongoing
Urban design plan from June 1998 showing, left to right: the public wetland
next to the lake; new ‘lake villas’ and ‘longhouses’ in blue-grey on a new
territory forming a straight edge to the wetland; and the new village repair
strategy in the old town, with buildings of historic importance in black.
The city’s gods, according to some people, live in the depths, in the
black lake that feeds the underground stream.
Italo Calvino 2
While working on this venture, Beigel and Christou had time
to think and perhaps to reconsider the landscape-generating
role that as architects they found themselves developing, and
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