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ContributorsBoudewijn Almekinders is a principal of OKRALandscape Architects, Utrecht, and a tutor in theDepartment of Landscape Architecture at LarensteinUniversity, Amsterdam.Ann Bergsjö is an Associate Professor in theSwedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU),Alnarp, where she teaches courses in landscapearchitecture and construction detailing. She was previously employed by White, Stockholm, a Swedisharchitectural practice.Marti Franch has a landscape architecture practicebased in Girona, north of Barcelona. He is a graduate of Greenwich University, and a part-time lecturerat the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.Sue Jackson is a chartered landscape architectand the principal of the Durham-based practiceBluespace environments. Sue has been employedin private practices, local authorities and mostrecently at Newcastle University, where she taughtlandscape architecture and environmental planning.Emma Jonasson is a landscape architect currentlyemployed by the office of Thing & Wainø A/S inCopenhagen.Ad Koolen is the principal of Ad Koolen Advies enOntwerp and a tutor in the landscape architecturexschools at Wageningen University and LarensteinUniversity in the Netherlands.Ingrid Schegk was appointed to a full professorship at Weihenstephan University of AppliedSciences in 1995, where she teaches landscapeconstruction and design in the faculty of LandscapeArchitecture.Kinga Szilágyi is a chartered landscape architectand Professor in the Department of Garden andUrban Design, Faculty of Landscape Architecture,Corvinus University of Budapest, where she teaches urban green system planning and design.Sabrina Wilk was appointed Professor of Graphics,Visualisation and Design in the Faculty of LandscapeArchitecture at the Weihenstephan University ofApplied Sciences in 1999, having worked previouslyas a landscape architect in Germany.

Illustration creditsThe authors and publishers would like to thankthe following individuals and institutions for givingpermission to reproduce illustrations. We have madeevery effort to contact copyright holders, but ifany errors have been made we would be happy tocorrect them at a later printing.Denmark1.1; 1.18; 1.22; 1.241.2; 1.31.5–1.17; 1.19–1.21;1.23; 1.25–1.29Ireland2.1; 2.2; 2.5; 2.7;2.82.3; 2.4; 2.6; 2.9;2.13; 2.16; 2.172.11; 2.14; 2.15;2.182.12France3.13.23.3–3.20photo Torben Damphoto Julie RønnowAnnelise Bramsnæs andPoul JensenMcGarry Ni EanaighArchitectsSue JacksonMitchell AssociatesDublin City CouncilEmma JonassonTiboHYLGermany4.14.2–4.4; 4.6–4.8;4.134.5; 4.9–4.12; 4.15;4.16; 4.19;4.21–4.27; 4.30;4.32–4.38;4.40; 4.42; 4.44;4.46; 4.48; 4.494.14; 4.17; 4.18;4.20; 4.28; 4.294.31; 4.39; 4.41;4.43; 4.45; 4.47Hungary5.1; 5.17; 5.19–5.235.2; 5.3; 5.5–5.75.4; 5.8–5.105.11; 5.14; 5.24;5.255.12, 5.13; 5.15;5.165.18Stadt MünchenGiles Vexlard, Latitude NordIngrid SchegkHeiner LuzLohrer - Hochrein LandscapeArchitectsKinga SzilagyiGabor SzúcsIstvan DemjénSándorGábor Preisich: Budapestvárosépítésénék története I–IIIBalazs AlmásiThe Netherlands6.1–6.4; 6.6a; 6.6b; OKRA6.7–6.9xi

Illustration credits6.56.6c6.6d6.116.10; 6.12a–d;6.13 b–e;6.14–6.226.13aBen ter MullABT Bouwtechniekbüro O.O.G.permission through thepublisherAd KoolenA. BergsjöFFNS ArchitectsNiko de WitSpain7.1; 7.12; 7.15; 7.19Alejo Bagué7.2; 7.7; 7.11; 7.13;N Menbrives7.16–7.18b;7.20–7.22;7.24–7.27; 7.29; 7.307.3; 7.6; 7.8; 7.9;Ferrater7.10; 7.237.4; 7.5Ferrater / Figueres7.14 a–cM Franch7.28J. PàmiesxiiSweden8.1; 8.10; 8.12;8.13; 8.17; 8.18;8.22–8.258.2–8.9; 8.11;8.14–8.16;8.19–8.21The United Kingdom9.1; 9.17Ian Thompson9.2–9.13Thomas Heatherwick Studio9.14–9.16;Sheffield City Council9.18–9.23

IntroductionJens Balsby Nielsen, Torben Dam and Ian ThompsonThis is a book about landscape construction and theimportance of good detailed design, but it is not abook of standard details, nor will it instruct you howto set about creating details of your own. It might,however, convince you that the consideration ofdetail is as important as an exciting concept or astriking site plan. It might show how a big ideacan be worked through into every detail, and howdetails can come together in a powerfully convincing way. It might inspire you to think more carefullyabout detail, and to see the design of constructionas integral to the creative process.This book, like many a design project, has had along gestation. It was first proposed in 2001, at ameeting hosted by the Royal Veterinary University,Copenhagen. Two of the editors, Torben Dam andJens Balsby Neilsen, had issued an invitation to fellow academics with an interest in the teaching andunderstanding of construction. It was one of theparticipants, Ian Thompson, from the University ofNewcastle in the United Kingdom, who suggestedthat a book would be a suitable vehicle in which toexplore this theme.From the outset, the idea was not to produce a textbook or a set of instructions for producing landscapedetails, but to examine the topic of detailing throughthe consideration of case studies which would shedlight upon the design process. We were particularlyinterested in the way in which decisions were taken.Why was one detail favoured over another? Howdid designers come to choose their materials? Atwhat point did the consideration of details becomeimportant – was it a concern from the outset, or didit only become significant later in the development ofa design? Usually, when we look at a project or visita site, we know very little about the constraints andconditions within which the designer had to work.Another important topic was the relationship between aesthetics and the practicalities of use andmaintenance. What sort of compromises might benecessary? Designed landscapes are places to beused. Can an artistic vision withstand the mundanerealities of wear and tear? We were interested inprojects that could be taken to exemplify ‘bestpractice’, so we asked our contributors to selectschemes which had already won awards or receivedpositive reviews in the professional press. We didnot ask them to select the most recent designs, butto find projects which had been in place for a fewyears. Our reasoning was that only after a period ofuse would any deficiencies in design, materials orconstruction become evident. Readers should nottherefore be surprised to find projects in this bookwhich they have read about elsewhere. Our aimwas not to produce a glossy compendium of whatwas most recent; indeed we are more concernedwith what might be enduring.1

IntroductionThe title of the book is European LandscapeArchitecture: The Details, and all the case studiesare drawn from European countries. The original ideawas to invite each contributor to submit two casestudies, together with a brief introduction, settingthese projects in the context of the historical development of landscape architecture in their own country. There are 49 states that can, for geographicaland historical reasons, be considered part of Europe.Not all of them have a well-established profession oflandscape architecture, but there would still not bespace, within a single volume, to represent all thosecountries in which landscape architecture is practised.To a large extent, our contributors were self-selected,in that they were the people who responded to thatfirst invitation from Copenhagen, but we sought outa few other people later, in the interests of obtaininga good geographical spread. Therefore, the bookincludes chapters from as far west as Ireland, as fareast as Hungary, as far north as Sweden and as farsouth as Spain. In some chapters, there is only onecase study. For the most part, the contributors areresident in their lands of origin and they describework from their own country, but in a couple ofcases, compromise was necessary; the Irish chapteris written by an Englishwoman and the French chapter by a Swede educated in Denmark.We asked our authors not only to describe, but alsoto evaluate, so it was important that they should not2be writing about their own work. Again, we have toreport a compromise; Boudewijn Almekinders andAd Koolen worked on the two schemes describedin the Netherlands chapter. However, when it cameto the evaluation, we asked them to evaluate oneanother’s projects, rather than their own.Initially, we thought that the projects should allbe by indigenous designers, i.e. a British designshould be by a Briton and the Swedish design bya Swede. If there were any national differences inapproach or style, this might help reveal them. Inthe event, this too proved impossible to enforce,since Ingrid Schegk was very keen to write aboutthe Landscape Park Riem, near Munich, which wasdesigned by a Frenchman, Gilles Vexlard.This raises an interesting question. Does the titleof this book simply reflect the origins of its editors and authors, or is there something identifiable and distinctive about ‘European LandscapeArchitecture’? Throughout history, design influence has flowed back and forth around the world.Sixteenth-century Italian gardens influenced thoseof seventeenth-century France, while the grandmanner of Le Nôtre was enviously copied byGerman princes. In the eighteenth century it wasthe turn of England to provide the dominant culturalmodel, and the craze for the jardin anglais sweptaround the globe. Nor should we underestimate

Introductionthe oriental influence upon European design, represented in the eighteenth century by the passion forchinoiserie and more recently by the influence oftraditional Japanese design upon twentieth-centuryModernists and Minimalists.From the case studies gathered here, it seems thatthe places to which European designers have beenlooking most recently for their inspiration have beenSpain and France, or perhaps, more specifically,Barcelona and Paris.Following the establishment of democracy in Spain,the municipal authorities in Barcelona sought torevive the city’s civic life through a programme ofnew public spaces, an initiative given additionalemphasis by preparations for the Olympic Gamesin 1992. It was a programme that was admired andenvied by civic leaders, designers and plannersthroughout Europe.The spotlight then turned upon Paris, where theFrench government had, in 1982, proclaimed a competition for a new urban park for the twenty-firstcentury, to be built on the site of a former cattlemarket at La Villette. The competition was won byBernard Tschumi, a Swiss-born architect practisingand teaching in New York. Tschumi’s design wascontroversial, since it set its face against both thepleasurable presumptions of the picturesque andthe social worth and utility of Modernism. It seemedto be, at one and the same time, both mechanicaland mad, yet it certainly fulfilled the government’sdesire for a prominent cultural statement.Although Tschumi claimed to be celebrating disjunction and folly, the Parc de la Villette collaged andcollided three very ordered systems, a grid of brightred folies, a system of spaces based on simple geometrical shapes, and a path system which included dead-straight covered walkways. Despite itsauthor’s deconstructivist rhetoric, both Descartesand Le Nôtre contributed something to its design.A spate of significant parks soon followed. Therewas the Parc Citroën (opened in 1992), by AllainProvost and Gilles Clément, where the revival ofseventeenth-century geometries is plain to see, itsplan echoing the layout of Louis XIV’s great gardensat Marly, and Provost’s Parc Diderot at La Defense(also 1992), where neatly trimmed box hedging anda sculptural slate cascade swoop in waves down ahillside, another design that might please the spiritof the Sun King. Soon major commissions throughout Europe seemed to be tumbling into the hands ofFrench designers, not just the Landscape Park Reimdiscussed in this volume, but also two of the mostnotable projects in London, Allain Provost’s ThamesBarrier Park (completed 2000) and Desvigne Dalnoky’s plan for Greenwich Peninsula.3

IntroductionBoth Barcelona and Paris exemplify an enthusiasmfor urbanism. Over the past decade landscapearchitecture seems to have become predominantlyan urban profession, concerned above all with thequality of life in cities and towns. Generalisationsare difficult, because, as Marc Treib’s recent book,The Architecture of Landscape, 1940–1960, clearlydemonstrates,1 the profession has very differenthistories in different countries, but it neverthelessseems safe to hazard that this focus upon city liferepresents a shift. In Britain, during the middledecades of the last century, landscape architectsused to be more concerned with the effects ofdevelopments such as roads, dams, commercialforests, power stations and oil refineries upon thecountryside. Although many landscape practicesstill do similar work – many commissions are connected in some way with steering developmentproposals through the planning system – we hearless about it than we do about new parks andsquares in cities. And this change is not uniqueto Britain. Given a free choice of case studies,the only truly rural project selected by any of ourcontributors is the guest-house garden designedby Gábor Szücs, which appears in Kinga Szilagyi’schapter on Hungary.Wherever landscape architects have been concerned with cities, the dominant ideology has oftenbeen rus in urbe, the countryside in the town, and4the picturesque or naturalistic park has been thepreferred model. In Barcelona, where many of thenew spaces were relatively small and had beendesigned by architects rather than landscape architects, there was far less emphasis upon nature anda far greater use of hard materials. This transition isexpressed perfectly by Luis Peña Ganchegui’s Parcde L’Espanya Industrial, where banks of lawn sweepsoftly down to one side of a pool, in a manner thateven ‘Capability’ Brown might have recognised,while the other side of the same water body is hard,sharp, angular and stepped, speaking of industryand the city. In this book, Catalonian design is represented by the new botanic gardens in Barcelona.The image presented is rather softer and more naturalistic than we have come to associate with thatcity, since the gardens are designed to show plantsin their natural associations, yet the organising principle and the path layout depend upon a hard-edged‘irregular triangulated grid’.In Paris, Bernard Tschumi took things a stagefurther, throwing down a gauntlet to all naturalisticdesigners. The Parc de la Villette was not a park inthe traditional sense, he argued, it was ‘the biggestdiscontinuous building in the world’. While all thishas been happening, landscape architects have alsohad to recognise the rise of urban design, a sisteror brother profession perhaps, but one with whichthere is certainly a degree of sibling rivalry.

IntroductionWhat has all this meant in terms of detailed design,the main concern of this book? There is little doubtthat it has focused attention upon the qualitiesof hard materials. The balance between formalityand informality in landscape design has shifted, forthe moment at least, towards formality. We mightlabel the work of contemporary French designersas post-modern or deconstructivist, but it revivesclassical idioms and insists upon precision, neatlyclipped hedges and crisp patterns of paving. Howextraordinary it is to see the most ‘continental’ ofhorticultural techniques – pleaching – being usedto create an outdoor room in the middle of Dublin’sO’Connell Street. Modernist simplicity and functionalism survive in the design of street furniture,the strikingly contemporary braziers at Dublin’sSmithfield, or the elegant and practical benches ofBudapest’s Erzsébet Square.In Britain, characteristically perhaps, design isquirkier and ironic. Thomas Heatherwick’s BlueCarpet in Newcastle certainly uses contemporarymaterials in a precise and controlled way, but atthe same time the whole design is a deliberatejoke. The Peace Gardens in Sheffield are almostimpossible to pin down stylistically; despite theuse of contemporary materials and technologies,they hark back to traditional civic patterns of formality, yet they are infused with post-modern whimsyand a hint of the exotic.Another theme, clearly identifiable in the Danishand Swedish chapters, is the reuse of former industrial or dockland sites. This is not something uniqueto Europe. Richard Haag’s celebrated scheme forGasworks Park in Seattle, constructed on the siteof a former coal-gas conversion plant, was openedin 1975, keeping the rusty chimneys and retortsand recycling the abandoned machinery, brightenedup with coats of paint, in a playbarn. Equally iconic,the more recent Landscape Park Duisberg Nord,designed by the German practice, Latz Partner,turned a steelworks with blast furnaces and bunkers into an award-winning park.Back in the 1960s, reclamation was generally seenin Modernist terms; the site had to be swept bare orcovered over to create a history-free tabula rasa fornew construction. Gradually we came to see that toomuch that was valuable, socially, culturally and ecologically, was destroyed in such a process. The HarbourPark in Copenhagen exemplifies the new philosophyof conservation, conversion and reuse. Original granite sett paving and railway tracks have been retainedand the inverted hull of an old ferry-boat forms aneye-catching shelter. Across the Öresund, Malmö’sDaniaparken reuses a harbour site, but with lessrecycling of on-site materials. Nevertheless, the character of the new park is derived from its opennessand from its traditional palette of materials, mainlygranite, gravel and tarred wood.5

IntroductionThese case studies are presented in the convictionthat they can be an aid both to creative work andto education. As Peter Blundell-Jones has written,‘starting with the case rather than the laws at leastassures dialogue with the material’.2 In similar vein,Mark Francis has observed:For professional education, case studies arean effective way to teach by example, to learnproblem-solving skills, and to develop usefulevaluation strategies. For the profession asa whole, case studies are a way to build abody of criticism and critical theory, and todisseminate the effectiveness of landscapearchitecture outside the profession. A casestudy is a well-documented and systematicexamination of the process, decision-makingand outcomes of a project, which is undertaken for the purpose of informing future practice, policy, theory, and/or education.3There has been considerable discussion of the casestudy methodology as a research tool within academic and professional circles, in both architectureand landscape architecture. Blundell-Jones can seethe advantages of the case study method: ‘Lookingat a small sample detail, one can feel more confident of getting at least something right than whenbuilding an edifice of theory that might crumbleinto a thousand pieces in the face of contradictory6evidence.’4 Rolf Johansson says that the adoptionof case studies as a research methodology linksresearch and practice.5 And Malene Hauxner saysthat to criticise works of garden art without knowingthe circumstances of their creation can lead to evengreater misunderstandings. Gardens are created ina particular time, on a particular programme, intended fo

European Landscape Architecture This is an important new book about landscape con-struction and good detailed design. It is not a book of standard details in landscape architecture, nor does it give the reader step-by-step instructions; instead it highlights how important it is to c