The Zurich Münsterhof is steeped in magenta – at least for the duration of the Festspiele Zürich festival 2018 from June 1 to 24. For the design of the festival center, an ideas competition was held at the HSR Technical University Rapperswil. The winner was a project called “Jungle Cube” by Nadine Jost and Regula Luder. Landscape architect Viola Thiel and the curator of this year’s festival, Belén Montoliú, refined the idea. We talked with Viola Thiel about the project.
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How has “Jungle Cube” come about?
The foundation and the curator of this year’s festival, Belén Montoliú, contacted us – the HSR Technical University Rapperswil – expressing the idea of organizing a competition for landscape architecture students who were enrolled in the spring 2017 class ‘Designing with Plants’. They were given the challenge to design the festival center on the Münsterhof town square.
Was there a general theme for the design?
This year, the festival’s motto is “Beauty | Madness”. Together with independent landscape architects, the festival foundation, the Zurich Tonhalle orchestra and the head of urban planning awarded the contribution of our students. But what’s more: Now, in June 2018, the Project is being realized in downtown Zurich. The temporary installation will add to the entire Münsterhof and we believe: it’s impressive.
“The installation poses the question of the relationship between nature and artificiality.”
What’s the goal of the project?
The Future-Forest installation that derived from the “Jungle Cube” submission to the competition, raises questions about the relationship between nature and artificiality. The expansive installation is an eye-catcher and incorporates the historical background of the old town and the Fraunmünster Church. With its vegetated cube and the 1.000 square meters of pink artificial turf, the town square is functionally and artistically enhanced. This way, it gets a distinguishable face during the festival. The project is a meeting and exchanging place for those interested in culture as well as unsuspecting pedestrians. The artificial turf provides a stage for major events. It works as a creative frame for classical concerts, the opening ceremony with children’s choirs, and the Beauty Campus. For the different events, up to 3,000 visitors are expected.
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What role did the students who won the competition play when the project was realized?
During the planning phase, the two winners could follow all the processes involved. Within a number of workshops in close cooperation with Belén Montoliú and me, the original idea was refined. From the entry in the competition, a palpable project derived. During the actual realization phase, the two students were only peripherally involved.
How important are such feasible projects for landscape architectural studies?
Often these temporal installations in public spaces are created within the scope of the study. They are very important because they – seemingly incidentally – make topics of urban and spatial development easy to grasp.
“It’s about creating new cityscapes.”
What do the students learn there?
The space, in this case the Münsterhof, is changed for three or for weeks. But this isn’t about actually building or creating but developing new cityscapes, dealing with the space, shifting perception, and changing perspectives on allegedly well-known places. The interdisciplinary work with cultural institutions cooperation and the academia makes this a very interesting task for students.
Celebrating its 30 year anniversary, the 16th International Waste Management and Landfill Symposium organized by Eurowaste from 2-6 October in Sardinia has witnessed radical changes in practices of solid waste management throughout the global south and global north. It has been an influential platform for these new practices, policies and research in waste management.
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Social value through landscape design
The topic of Waste Architecture was included for the first time in the history of the International Symposium under the Waste Architecture Platform. Presentations focused primarily on creating social value through landscape and architectural design projects related to the practice of landfilling demonstrated through case studies, design research and Masters Theses.
Preoccupations with managing public perception, strategies to eliminate negative connotations associated with these types of facilities and strategies for integrating educational components that aim to make the various waste management processes more transparent to society were recurrent subjects in various presentations such as the one by Israel Alba or the workshop chaired by Hanif Kara.
Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design presented their recently completed research on Architecture and Waste,
A (Re)planned Obsolescence. This project focused on the role that architecture and design can have on better integrating Waste to Energy facilities in their context while addressing issues of the eventual obsolescence of the facilities and their potential future reuse. The presentation offered a series of tools, strategies and protocols that aim to reconfigure the organization of these plants in response to; tighter sites located within urban contexts, coexistence with potentially compatible public programs, future occupancies as well as a range of hybridization strategies that address public perceptions and future obsolescence while also aiming to minimize energy loss and making the plants more efficient in their inputs/outputs.
Cultivation of dynamic landscapes
There was also an emphasis on the importance of the cultivation of dynamic landscapes and environments where the engineering of buffer zones between the plant and the surrounding areas would address storm water management strategies or the integration of wetlands for phytoremediation purposes.
These areas of exploration in landscape and architectural design related to the waste industry are in their infancy, yet the work presented at the conference caught the imagination of an audience eager to hear more on the subject and seduced by projects that use design as a vehicle to celebrate and offer compelling prototypes and solutions within a wider transparent waste management processes.
