‘Activating Nature’The Magic Realism of ContemporaryLandscape Architecture in Europe

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In recent years, landscape architecture in public spaces hasundergone a remarkable ascendancy. In Europe, themetamorphosis of cities’ identities has been triggered by theexpansion of commercially driven activities. Economic changehas enabled urban parks and gardens, building/public amenitylandscapes and former industrial areas in remedial intensivecare to undergo transformation and be thrown open to thetumultuous footfall of the wider public everywhere. Landscapearchitecture, previously seen as synonymous with gardendesign as a small-scale afterthought, is now an urbancommodity in the eyes of commercial developers, almost asattractive as coffee bars on every street corner.

Public and private clients in European cities large andsmall are increasingly keen on the idea that landscapedimprovements to the urban fabric lie in revealing what isalready there and creating legibility, rather than imposing analien form of picturesque. Many European cities, apart from afew that are shrinking, are rapidly becoming moremulticultural, and in response there has been a paradigmshift by professional landscape architects and urban designerstowards a multiple and flexible informal use of space by awide range of user groups.

Allowing for spontaneous behaviour, intimacy, playfulnessand exploration rather than its constraint throughreproduction of past historical styles, the new Europeanlandscape architecture is urbanist through and through. Itscommitment is to the creation of visual landmarks, but alsospaces that are inviting to allcomers. Landscape architecture’sformer reliance on picturesque or, indeed, Modernist tacticsof old has evolved into a more hybrid, narrative form of urbandesign expression. Most landscape architects in Europe arenot polemicists, but the injection of narrative and art-based

The redefinition of European cities hascreated new opportunities for the greening ofpublic urban spaces. Lucy Bullivantdescribes how three young practices inparticular – West 8, Gross.Max and MosbachPaysagistes – are leading the way with theirhighly dynamic and inventive narrativeapproaches to history, culture and theemergent city.

Gross. Max, Vertical garden, London, 2005View of the vertical garden created with artist Mark Dion near Tower Bridge.

Gross. Max, Bullring, Birmingham, 2003The informal character of the limestone steps and terraces acts as a magnetfor the public to use the new shopping centre.

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techniques into contemporary landscapes is an activistantidote to the slippage in meaning of urban places. Detachedfrom industrial history, and being overlaid by the nonplacesof retail, the junk spaces they spawn when commercialismbecomes the sole motor for their development needs a holisticlandscape urbanism to bring a sense of direction.

Defining a sense of place in a contemporary Europeancontext is an activity that the younger generation oflandscape architects have leverage to carry out at afundamental level. They do not do spur-of-the-moment‘guerrilla gardening’ (although the London-based movementof the same name has made rapid headway, and recentlyreceived an award for the ‘greening’ of Elephant and Castlefrom Southwark Council). Rather, their work is developer-sanctioned aesthetic activism, and in activating nature theyCollage of the Garden for a Plant Collector, from the Gross.Max competition book.

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are commanding the strongest, yet most aggravated, forcethere is – bar the markets – to play a leading role incontemporary society.

Added to this, recent climate change in Europe (the greenopen spaces of London’s parks were reduced to scorched earthas the city went Mediterranean in the summer of 2006, andworld-standard UK wine-growing became a hot prospect forthe future) has not only prompted future opportunities forradical changes in the ways buildings are constituted, asecosystems. It has also led to urban environmental noveltiessuch as urban (Paris) and tropical indoor (Berlin) beaches, andyear-round indoor ski slopes with ‘real snow’ (Scotland).

For the Edinburgh-based landscape architecture practiceGross.Max, narrative is a vital component of contemporarylandscapes. ‘We like extremes, otherwise the whole world

becomes lookalike,’ says Eelco Hooftman, who founded thepractice with Bridget Baines in the Scottish capital in 1995. Thefirm first attracted public attention for its informallandscaping of the Bullring, Birmingham’s central shoppingarea, in 2003, and has since completed schemes for ZahaHadid’s BMW plant in Leipzig, Germany, and the public spacesat the refurbished Royal Festival Hall in London. Though as yetstill relatively unknown even within the architectural world,Gross.Max has injected an optimistic breeze of fresh air andexuberance into UK urban design. For the architects’ proposedenvironment for the House for an Art Lover, Glasgow, anunbuilt MacKintosh project that a Glaswegian group recentlydetermined to make real for the first time, they presented theclient with a book of computer-generated imagery focused onDes Esseintes, the fictional protagonist of JK Huysmans’

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.

Zaha Hadid Architects and Gross.Max, BMW Leipzig, Germany, 2005Courtyard with a grove of apple trees.

The dynamically geometric car-park layout was created to give the impressionof ‘accelerating’ rows of poplar trees, with water-retention pools.

Gross.Max, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2003–View from the Edinburgh Gateway centre towards the new biodiversity garden.

Gross. Max, Rottenrow Gardens, Strathclyde University, Glasgow, 2003Aerial view of the public garden.

The central core of the public garden has become a popular urban location.

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decadent novel Against Nature (1903) and a plant lover whotends a glasshouse of rare specimens. The 150-page bookbursts with proposals for ‘a heterotopia of plants blurring theboundary between the natural and the artificial’.

Hooftman wants landscape architecture to return toexperimentation on the level it reached in 17th- and 18th-century Britain, radically reshaping nature according to fashionand taste as dandies, hermits and poets were liable to do.Such a revival, he feels, is especially necessary after a periodgrossly lacking in landscape design creativity at the end of thelate 20th century, when it became a mere afterthought tackedon to the end of the construction process. Smaller culturalprojects, such as the House for an Art Lover and the verticalgarden against a blank wall near Tower Bridge in London thepractice is completing for the American artist Mark Dion,offer valuable opportunities to intervene in the public realm.

Landscape design as the ‘physical and rationalmanipulation of an objectified reality’ is already intrinsic toDutch urban design, borne of the need to createcomprehensive and efficient use through polders and dykes of

land below sea level. ‘In the Netherlands there is the idea thatyou can make land, make nature, which explains ourgrassroots politics,’ says Hooftman. ‘We are about a newpicturesque.’ 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 ZahaHadid, for whose intensely wrought aesthetics Gross.Max hascompleted a number of successful landscape schemes. For hernew 200-hectare (494-acre) BMW site in Leipzig, its landscapearchitecture, inspired by agricultural landscapes, combines aresponse to the radical nature of Hadid’s architecture,functional use of the site and ecological considerations. A rowof ‘accelerating trees’ planted increasingly close togetheralong the side of the car park provides orientation and adynamism to this normally mundane environment.

Hooftman believes that landscape architecture can serve as atesting ground for urbanism. Society’s colonisation oflandscape is a complex phenomenon, and now the biggerdevelopers are coming to see art and architecture as acommodity, which encourages a contextual approach to

Mosbach Paysagistes, Le Jardin Botanique de Bordeaux (Botanical Garden of Bordeaux): stage 1 (garden),2001–02; stage 2 (museum and greenhouses), 2004–05On a site adjacent to Bordeaux’s Garonne River, on its left bank, the thin wedge (600 x 70 metres/1,969 x 230 feet) ofbotanic gardens is in the centre of an urban redevelopment project by Dominique Perrault. The brief was to create abotanic 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.

The multitextured panorama of the field of crops has 49 elevated beds in sixrows, some of which are surrounded by thin steel planters, set among grass,with open water-tanks at the end. Inside each planter is a series oflongitudinal trenches in which agricultural species from the Aquitaine regionare grown. They encompass all the ethnobotanical uses, and can be eaten, orused as cut flowers or for their medicinal uses, as detailed on the signage.

Mosbach Paysagistes, Le Jardin Botanique de Bordeaux (Botanical Garden ofBordeaux): stage 1 (garden), 2001–02; stage 2 (museum and greenhouses), 2004–05The environmental gallery is a series of mounds that are elevated simulations of thegeomorphological strata and soil profiles of the Aquitaine region in two rows, representingthe two banks of the river, with the five mounds of clay, gravel and sandstone to the northrepresenting the right bank.

flourish. This is evident in the design of a number of new urbanparks, for example, making them characterful yet culturallyporous urban additions rather than merely generic backdropsto buildings. Gross.Max’s terraced Rottenrow Gardens, forGlasgow’s Strathclyde University, fulfils this role, functioning asthe outdoor social centre of the university for students andstaff, and a hub in a network of routes linking the campus.

In France, a radical reinvention of the hitherto largelyhermetic archetypical typology of the botanic garden wasundertaken in 2002 by Catherine Mosbach, of MosbachPaysagistes, for the district of Bordeaux on the right bank ofthe Garonne River. Instead of creating a hermetic garden or apublic park, Mosbach has forged a new hybrid of urbanparkland overlaying the historic grid of the agricultural landof the La Bastide district here and the old downtown area onthe left bank. Her design includes a water garden, anenvironmental ‘gallery’ of botanic and agricultural landscapeslaid out in a field of wide strips the public is free to wanderthrough and study – the ecological part of the project – andan 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 speciesset above the adjacent road. The gallery is an overly artificialcross section of the Aquitaine Basin region’s naturalclassifications – sand dune, water and dry meadows, oakwoodlands, heath and limestone – yet they bring the reality ofthe region to this urban site. Botanic gardens mostly try to

outdo each other with exotic species, but this one plays adifferent game, promoting landscape as cultural heritage.Mosbach describes her vision as a philosophical rather than anecological one, using natural flows to draw human movement.

Her largest urban project to date has been a new 7-kilometre (41/3-mile) long walkway along the canal of St Denisfrom La Villette to the island of St Denis in Paris, and she iscurrently developing the park for the Louvre’s new regionalmuseum at Lens in Nord-Pas-de-Calais (a group of ninebuildings) on a 20-hectare (40-acre) site, together withJapanese architects SANAA and New York museum designersImrey Culbert. An open relationship between the museum,nature and the landscape will be achieved through a circuittaking visitors out of the buildings and along glazed pathswinding through a clearing. Jack Lang, the former FrenchMinister of Culture, has described the scheme as ‘a projectthat starts from the earth and reaches for the stars’.

Dutch urban designers and landscape architects West 8, ledby founder Adriaan Geuze, established its reputation in the1990s with projects at home – the RotterdamSchouwburgplein and, more recently, the Borneo Sporenburgdocklands development in Amsterdam. The best known of theyounger generation of landscape architects, the practice, instepping aside from the age-old opposition between city andnature in favour of their fusion, has a disciplined, context-based methodology. This underlies a frequently surreal,heterogeneous and often humorously tongue-in-cheek

The water garden is an irregular grid of basinsseparated by paved walkways.

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approach: ‘Public space must reinforce a city’s existing spirit,’says Geuze. Palm trees grow from lamp posts, concrete isgiven an illusory, ‘wild’ nature, watercourses loosely suggestLeonardo da Vinci’s canal system, and the design of publicparks is given a music- or dance-like syncopation. Nodistinction is made between urbanism, landscaping,architecture and botany, whatever the scale, from streetfurniture to squares, parks and urban masterplans.

Geuze is inspired by the potential mobility of landscape.The passage from Shakespeare’s Macbeth that describesBirnam Wood moving appeals to him; thus winning such alarge and – when it is realised in 2010 – transformationalEuropean urban scheme as the Parque Lineal del Manzanaresin Madrid in autumn 2005 gave him a real frisson. With theM30 freeway being taken underground, West 8, working withlocal architects Burgos & Garrido Arquitectos, Porras & LaCasta Arquitectos and Rubio & Alvarez-Sala Arquitectosis, willtransform the 80-hectare (198-acre) valley on the RioManzanares over the next four years into a vital site ofmediation for the city, at a cost of 6 billion euros. Brandishingthe slogan ‘Mas rio – mas Madrid’ (More river – more Madrid),this will reorient the city towards the river, with a park withfive illusionistically designed water streams, and a boulevardof pine trees that connects almost all of Madrid’s parks,creating a new green ‘spine’.

In typically deft West 8 mode, the Madrid design employsmore than a touch of magic realism, each stream representinga certain mood – ‘The River of Passion’ and ‘The Creek ofMoonlight’ are just two – and distinguished by its own kind of

vegetation and materials. A spectacular grass-covered landbridge will connect the historic Royal Garden and the Casa deCampo (the former royal hunting grounds). And not only willa group of former slaughterhouses be converted into theCentro del Artes, a new district created from scratch forculture and arts, but 22 new bridges will bring both sides ofthe city closer together than ever before.

Despite West 8’s enormous international credibility andtrack record in creating new communities that are profoundlycontemporary yet not Disneyfied – for example, the BorneoSporenburg docklands and, in the UK, the Chiswick BusinessPark – ‘in England clients didn’t want to recognise that weworked between architecture and urban design’, Geuzeobserved in 2005. This narrow-minded attitude has clearlyshifted since then. The architects’ masterplanning role inStratford is advancing (but shrouded in secrecy at the client’srequest), and winning the competition for Jubilee Gardens onLondon’s South Bank promises to provide a conclusivelycreative yet practical statement for this heavily contestedriverside site. Organic, lush and green, with softly undulatinghills and ‘a botanical ambience’ the area has previouslylacked, it will have fluid paths, and prime lookout pointsframing panoramic views of the Thames, the London skylineand the South Bank, as well as intimate spaces to relax. Atnight, the lighting scheme will subtly animate and play withthe new ‘weaving landscape’.

For Luxury Village, a pedestrian shopping street in a newurban development in the forests just outside Moscow, West 8had the audacity to use Dutch clay bricks, and especially

West 8, Luxury Village, Moscow, Russia, 2004–06The 500-metre (1,640-foot) long street uses Dutch clay bricks, a paving material rarely seen in Russia.

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custom-cut bricks, a paving material rarely seen in Russia. The500-metre (1,640-foot) street is laid with two intertwinedpatterns, the second in two colours cutting through the first.The street surface is perforated in several places by pockets inwhich pine trees are planted along with seasonal flowers. Pinetrees can not only withstand the severe temperatures inMoscow, but create a visual connection between this mostcosmopolitan street lined with Prada, Gucci, Rolls-Royce andYves Saint Laurent and the birch pine forest surrounding it.

While such a prestige project has opened West 8’smarkets to luxury developments (and one wonders about theprospects of a future hermetic world of gated communitieslandscaped by the practice), the sheer heterogeneous rangeof the architects’ work will avoid typecasting. Winning theWaterfront Innovative Design competition in Toronto, ahighly public project, represents the side of the practice’swork that reclaims the water’s edge of cities. An 18-metre(59-foot) promenade with a wooden boardwalk, floating‘finger’ piers and a series of bridges transforms Queen’sQuay, described as the city’s Achilles Heel, into a space‘where the city kisses the lake’. In an almost unprecedentedperformance, in the summer of 2006 West 8 realised aprototypical chunk of the boulevard at 1:1 scale for a longweekend to see how people reacted, adding ‘a Bike deTriomphe’ constructed from old bicycles.

The work of West 8, Gross.Max and Mosbach Paysagistesdemonstrates that younger landscape architects are taking awider social responsibility in response to complex urbanneeds for redefinition of space, whether it is industrial inorigin or public areas around new buildings. They are workingin a context of privatised land-use yet the huge pressure for

cities to redefine their identities is opening up newopportunities for creativity concerning the design and role ofgreen spaces. One facet of urban identity that has becometopical is the concept of integrating the countryside into thefabric of the city in order to create a common habitat. Thishas been discussed but rarely implemented in Europe. Thereare fears in a relatively small country like the UK that urbangrowth is bringing a tarmacking over of the countryside, andthat a sense of synergy between the urban and the rural islacking. The traditional European urban scenario has beenthat whenever the city has grown in size, nature andagriculture have disappeared as the urban has become twoopposing and ever more entrenched concepts. A rurban(rural–urban) hybrid, working with a territory’s agriculturalorigins, not denying it, typifies the Sociópolis urban schemefor the outskirts of Valencia, led by Vicente Guallart, whichintegrates the huerta, or market garden, into a new residentialcommunity alongside public amenities.

Wider interest in the three practices discussed above hasclearly been fostered in part by the effervescent yet relativelyhighbrow public celebration of nature and ‘bio-visions’ of thebiannual Bundesgartenschau (Federal Garden Exhibition). Thisevent – part exhibition, part trade fair – has opened minds topotential synergies between urban design and landscapearchitecture. The last event, attended by 3 million people over165 days, was staged in Munich. Its focus straddling leisureand culture complements a larger push in Germany towardsintegrated developments harmonising economic, local leisureand ecological requirements, including the preservation anduse of open spaces in an ecologically interconnected system.

An example of this is Berlin’s development as a Europeanurban district. Potsdam, which is over a thousand years old, isset, island-like, in a landscape of parks and lakes, much ofthem the legacy of the Prussian kings from 1657 who createdpalaces and gardens there. A UNESCO-protected site, its urbandevelopment adheres to three principles: the integration offormer military bases now being converted to civilian use;emphasising the park and garden character of the town whilemaintaining its world cultural heritage; and integrating itsvaried environments into a historically formed, mixed-usesystem. Here, the Dutch landscape architects B+B (Bakker enBleeker) have transformed a former Russian training campdating from the DDR era into the Waldpark Potsdam.

The programmatic possibilities arising across Europeancountries in this postindustrial era require nothing less than aholistic narrative approach to history, culture and the futureidentity of the city. The strategies of West 8, Gross.Max andMosbach Paysagistes show immense lucidity and intellectualleadership – and more than a dose of humour – when itcomes to the complex issues of nature and urban culture, andtheir combined potential as sustaining forces. 4

Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 76-81 © Gross.Max; p 81(tl) ©Gross.Max, photo Peter Iain Campbell; pp 82-3 & 85 © ADAGP, Paris andDACS, London 2007; p 84 © BMA APPA; pp 86-7 © courtesy of West 8

The brick paving of the Luxury Village is perforated in several places withround tree areas called ‘pockets’, containing pine trees also found in thesurrounding birch pine forest.