How to create a public park, which shows proud its past legacy as an industrial area and additionally works as a purification basin for rainwater? The Turf Design Studio & Environmental Partnership has done this task so well, they were awarded with the 2016 AAP American Architecture Prize in the category of landscape architecture. The Sydney Park is now part of Sydney’s Decentralised Water Masterplan, which is specifically focused on reducing the City’s potable water demand by 10% before 2030.
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From waste disposal to popular parkland
In the past two decades, the area has transformed from its industrial and landfill utilisation, into a popular recreation area for the residents of the growing communities of Sydney’s south east. With its 44 hectares, the Sydney Park is the third largest public park in the inner-city of Sydney. In the nineties, the site was famous for its subcultural music activities, which culminates into big rock festivals during the noughties. The area is still a cultural place today, but in a more quiet and relaxing way. Mixing planting and greenspaces with historic remains from smokestacks and factories, the Sydney Park is combining urban and natural environments.
Park with a purpose
When the urban planners searched for places to implement the Decentralised Water Masterplan, they found an ideal place at this site. Originally a swamp, you can find depressions, where storm water flows automatically. The Turf Design Studio & Environmental Partnership developed a water management system to harvesting urban waste water and improving water quality. Also, they designed a few cascades to overcome the difference in altitude and creating natural rapids. Today, the newly created wetlands not only capture and cleans the measure of 340 Olympic-sized swimming pools worth per annum, but shows the visitor a part of the natural circulation of water. With its thriving fauna and flora, the Sydney Park is educating the community about the interdependent of urban and natural environments.
Since September 2016 the Brazilian city São José dos Campos owns a remarkable landmark. The Spanish architecture office IDOM created an exciting recreation area with many attractions into a mountainous landscape. Bright red coloured and eye-catching handrails are leading the visitors through the whole site like a signpost.
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Tough preconditions
The biggest challenge for the two leading architects Pedro Paes Lira and Eugénio Filipe Teixeira was the topography of the rangy site, which is 125,000 square metres in size. Although the area is enclosed by the city São José, it is characterised by steep and wooded mountain sides. But instead of moving the earth, the architects decided to adapt the topography and integrated their design into the landscape. Also, there stands a historic country house on top of one hill, which had to be preserved. Now it serves as a cultural centre.
Successful result
Because of the adaption, the structures fit into the landscape like a shapeable mass and underline the special topography. The red handrails have a high recognition value and connecting all attractions of the recreation area. At these places, you can find a skate park, a zip line, a treetop path or a climbing wall. So, the public park Alberto Simões invites not only for walks, it also offers a large variety of activities in the middle of an urban area.
Duisburg, 1985: The Meiderich Ironworks abandons the coal and steel production plant in Duisburg, after polluting the area for more than eight decades. Six years later, the landscape architect Peter Latz is commissioned to design a public park on site. Instead of turning the area into a classical garden park, Latz embraced the site’s industrial past. In Rust Red, Latz shares his firsthand knowledge of the project to present. A book review.
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In August 2015 the Guardian architecture critic Rowan Moore ranked the Duisburg-Nord Landscape Park as one of the ten best parks in the world. Yet this icon of contemporary landscape architecture had already found recognition outside of specialist circles. In 2005 the Museum of Modern Art in New York used an exhibition entitled “Groundswell: Constructing the Contemporary Landscape” to showcase modern landscape architecture to an interested public. This park landscape on a former industrial site was one of the projects shown in the exhibition, while this magnum opus from Peter Latz has also come to feature regularly in expert discussions.
Now Latz has called on more than 20 years of personal experience to pen the book Rust Red – Landscape Park Duisburg-Nord. He seeks to present a “mature park”, showing what can evolve out of ideas, sketches and colorful pictures. In five chapters (approach, structures, methods, places and visions) he takes readers on a walk through the park and shares with them thoughts, reflections and concepts surrounding the design stage, as well as experiences, impressions and developments from the subsequent years. He explains how he and his team approached the seemingly chaotic layout of the former Meidericher Ironworks, analysing the site, filtering out feasible structures and eventually transforming them into a contemporary park. Project partners and associates also chip in with their own written contributions. In addition to numerous well-known pictures, new photographs provide new perspectives. It is easy to think that everything has been said about such a renowned project, but this publication is certainly a must-have for any professional library.
Well, it’s been fun. Watching the slow drip of negative information about the Garden Bridge has become something of a spectator sport for some Londoners. But with a construction start date rapidly approaching, it’s time to stop playing and put this thing back in its box.
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Let’s start with the assumption that we need a pedestrian bridge between Temple and the South Bank. It’s not a crazy one: the gap between Waterloo and Blackfriars bridges is about the same as that between Blackfriars and Southwark before the Millennium bridge came along. But if the purpose of a bridge is to quickly move people between two points, this bridge fails. The Garden Bridge Trust estimates it will take 12 minutes to cross — an inordinately long time, and the same amount of time you’d take to get between the two points by taking a detour via Waterloo bridge.
I recently met the Chief Executive of the Garden Bridge Trust who, despite having enthusiasm in spades, couldn’t elaborate a transport need for the bridge beyond ‘Waterloo bridge isn’t nice to walk along’ (tell that to The Kinks) and ‘it’ll help open up the Strand’ (an area which is hardly undervisited).
It feels very much like attempting to retrofit a reason onto an idea someone (Joanna Lumley) once had. RIBA, in a document explaining the background to the bridge, says “there is no objective reasoned analysis, evidence or comparative study as to what problem is being solved or function fulfilled pre-dating the design solution”.
There are so many problems with the Garden Bridge — why no provision for cyclists? Why isn’t it open 24 hours a day? Why can it be closed if the Trust needs to hold a fundraising party? What will be the effect of all these people on the already crowded South Bank and the deliberately peaceful Temple Gardens? How on earth does it take 12 minutes to cross? — but the one that’s becoming increasingly serious is what looks like favouritism in the selection of design and designer, and a scandalous misuse of public funds.
The short version: Heatherwick Studio, which had been working with Joanna Lumley on the concept of a garden bridge for some years, won a tender to “help progress ideas for a new footbridge” over two much more experienced firms. Those firms outlined in detail how they would study the parameters and constraints to work out options. According to RIBA, Heatherwick Studio’s submission included, rather presumptuously, its design for the Garden Bridge. Late. With cost estimates far in excess of the other bids. Yet the company still came top of Transport for London’s scoring system — a system that nobody quite understands, because documentation has been destroyed.
Boris Johnson, while Mayor of London, met Joanna Lumley and Thomas Heatherwick before the bidding process started. He even went with Heatherwick and Isabel Dedring, then Deputy Mayor for Transport, to Apple in San Francisco in an attempt to secure funds for what was then intended to be an entirely privately funded project, again before the tender process began. The former Mayor has responded with bluster and insults to questions about the propriety of these meetings — which is generally what happens when he’s on the back foot.
Because of course, the bridge isn’t being funded privately. 60 million pounds of public money is being invested (20 million pounds of which is now a long-term, very low interest loan). Of the 30 million pounds from the Treasury, the National Audit Office says: “George Osborne avoided official channels and Department for Transport oversight to offer Boris Johnson funding for the Garden Bridge, warning the project may not have been approved if normal processes had been followed.”
This isn’t reassuring. In fact, the whole thing stinks. There have been various calls — from RIBA, the London Assembly, Kate Hoey MP, to name a few — for the process under which Heatherwick Studio won the bid to be investigated and, at least, recoup taxpayer money that has been given to the project. One of the first actions of new Mayor Sadiq Khan was to open an investigation into that procurement process, but he’s backed the project as a whole.
I believe the project should be iced and a more sensible pedestrian and cycling bridge be developed, one more in line with principles of constant public access and swift transportation needs. A scaled-back, elegant crossing would also cost less than the 175 million pounds needed for the Garden Bridge; a pedestrian and cycle bridge at Rotherhithe is predicted to cost around 88 million pounds, and that one has to open to allow tall ships through.
It’s time to let the Garden Bridge go.
