Table of contents for Squares and Promenades in Topos

Reading the Landscape How much longer will it be possible to visit rainforests? When will we only find monotonous plantations and dreary areas instead of the original paradisiacal landscapes? “Till It’s Gone” is the title of William Ewing’s introduction to the book Reading the Landscape by photographer Olaf Otto Becker. Ewing gets to the heart of what worries Becker: “You might not always know what you’ve got till it’s gone, but Becker won’t let you forget what’s going”. With beautiful photographs Becker documents, among other things, the rainforests of Malaysia. The beauty of his images in the Habitat I series completely removes the horrors this terra incognita once exuded. The photographs that Becker made for the Habitat II series, however, reveal a new kind of horror, i.e. the trail of…

Charismatic and Visionary: Hans J. Loidl 1944 – 2015 We mourn for the person, companion, partner, colleague and icon in the field of landscape architecture. Charismatic and witty, with a keen vision and a great sense of astuteness, he had the gift of making complex relationships readily understandable. As a Dionysian spirit, his way of thinking always proceeded from that which was experienced, felt, perceived and finally reflected upon. From a solitary farm in the park-like cultural landscape of Austria’s Waldviertel, Loidl came to Vienna at the age of nine. He later studied forestry at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, after which he began a postgraduate landscape architecture programme with professors Roland Rainer and Friedrich Woess. Upon completing studies of urban planning and landscape architecture in Copenhagen,…

Were the homebound students of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry to arrive at King’s Cross – amongst the buzz created by the 140,000 passengers using the station each day – they would be enchanted by the scale of recent change outside. Over the last 15 years, London has witnessed the revival of a distinctive element in its spatial matrix, the urban square, as the place of encounter, exchange, and civic identity. London’s urban garden square, of which there are more than 600, has shaped the city’s distinctive layout since the 17th century, and with it, to some extent, the image of public space today. Yet in a dynamic city like London, there are many facets to the way public space manifests. Since the mid-1990s, London’s population has again been…

Geneva’s harbour basin, with its blue sheet of water protruding far into the city, the lakeside promenades and the 140-meter-high water jet fountain, is a landmark of this Swiss city located on the eponymous lake. However, the space that is even more emblematic of the city’s history, whether festive or everyday events, is the Plaine (plain) of Plainpalais, a wide, lozenge-shaped – recently turned red – square, which has miraculously remained dry and free of structures for over a thousand years. This large open space, wrested from the River Arve in a long and hard battle by driving stakes into the marshy ground and building dikes, is actually in many ways similar to the harbour basin. In both spaces it is the surrounding mountains, rather than the façades of the…

Over forty percent of Africa’s population lives in one of the continent’s metropolitan regions. Everyday life on the streets of these cities that never sleep is the central theme of Lard Buurman’s Africa Junctions, a series of photographs produced over a six year period in twelve African countries and fifteen cities. In Alexandria, Cairo, Cape Town, Casablanca, Dakar, Dar es Salaam, Douala, Johannesburg, Kampala, Kinshasa, Lagos, Luanda, Lubumbashi, Lusaka, and Nairobi, Buurman’s camera captured the way people go about their private, public, social, and business lives on streets and in public spaces. These are places where sidewalks literally turn into rows of open-air stores, along with hairdressing salons, copy shops, auto repair shops, and laundries. The photos in the series look like snapshots of an urban setting, but appearances are…

It is clearly spring, but the weather is proving less favourable. Dense clouds cover the sun and it could begin to rain at any moment. This does not deter the large numbers of people strolling along the middle of Vienna’s newly designed Mariahilfer Strasse. Where cars once stood bumper to bumper, nudging each other along the shopping street, today people can walk, stroll, cycle or even sit and linger. Responsible for the redesign of the street linking the city’s Westbahnhof railway station with the Museum Quarter are the Dutch landscape architects Bureau B+B and the Vienna architects orso.pitro. The first construction phase was opened in October 2014; the second will follow shortly. The first priority was to improve the quality of life for local residents, visitors and business people. And…

Building Clouds: Swarovski Crystal Worlds in Wattens, Austria Using the slogan “Building architecture as light and variable as clouds”, the Vienna architecture office Coop Himmelb(l)au began to change the world of architecture in the 1960s. Gravity, however, often brought their cloud-like, airy designs back down to earth. Effectively fighting gravity is not something that Andy Cao and Xavier Perrot’s Crystal Cloud at the Swarovski Cyrstal Worlds in the Tyrolean town of Wattens can claim to do either. The forest of columns holding up the crystal-laden, cloud-like wire structure is proof of this. When sunshine makes the crystals begin to sparkle, however, the garden artists’ installation does appear to become impressively light. In addition, the entire spectrum of colours found in a rainbow is reflected in the dark surface of the…

International Carlo Scarpa Prize for Gardens Awarded to Maredolce-La Favara Gardens, Palermo, Italy Maredolce-La Favara in Palermo, Italy, has been awarded the International Carlo Scarpa Prize for Gardens 2015. It is the 26th in the series of annual awards made by the Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche. Maredolce-La Favara lies at the heart of the Brancaccio District of Palermo, in an area that has come to be known as the Conca d’Oro, and which stands as a tangible reminder of landscape in the Arab and Norman civilisations in Sicily. Today the area is a vast depression, but in the past it was a huge reservoir with an irregularly shaped island at its centre and a magnificent palace standing on its edge. It now has ranks of recently-built houses on two sides.…

In the course of the last 10 years a new iconic Rotterdam Central Station (Rotterdam CS) arose at the place where before a humble city station was located. Responsible for the design is Team CS, a cooperation between Benthem Crouwel Architects, MVSA Meyer en Van Schooten Architecten and West 8. Team CS approached the new station complex not as a terminal building, but as a square. “All team members had an allergic reaction against closed terminal buildings,” Adriaan Geuze, landscape architect and partner of West 8 urban design & landscape architecture explains. Conceiving of the station as a square helped to master the complexities of the commission and offer Rotterdam and its citizens a safe and comfortable urban environment. Multiple complexities. Rotterdam CS is a highly complex project for many…

Local actors who operate at the interface between civil society and urban development are becoming increasingly important. Up to now space pioneers were mainly known for their involvement with models of temporary use and the appropriation of space as part of this phenomenon of interim use that has taken cities by storm since the 1990s. For a certain period of time space pioneers take over buildings and brownfield sites and fit them to their needs, thus contributing to user-based urban planning. There is, however, often little chance of preserving these appropriated places or of giving them a long-term perspective. Although a growing interest in the design of one’s own environment and the idea of building one’s own city can be observed, user-based urban planning and project development involving local actors…

Nowhere is China’s urban transformation more striking than in Chongqing, the largest city on the upper reaches of the Yangtze River and its tributary the Jialing River. Once a rusting laggard, marooned far from the dynamic cities of the eastern seaboard, this rough-and-ready river port is undergoing spectacular change. Throughout the past decade, hundreds of towering apartment blocks have sprouted from the city’s hilly landscape, and new bridges span its rivers. Chongqing’s skyline, now a thicket of skyscrapers, resembles Hong Kong’s. River embankments have become highly engineered, and the city’s steep topography levelled to accommodate new road networks and high-rise estates. And the construction frenzy shows no sign of slowing. Chongqing’s leaders await even more rural people to migrate to the city and other towns within the larger municipality, which…

While driving through the streets of the Saudi capital Riyadh, one cannot help being struck by the concentration of dense, high-rise towers along Olaya Street and King Fahad Road, the two main commercial spines of the fast-growing metropolis. This highlights how critical the need for the urban square at King Fahad National Library is to the fabric of the city in general, and especially to the central business spine, as an open space to be enjoyed by both residents and visitors. Situated between these two main arteries of the capital, with both roads acting as commercial and governmental routes carrying the heaviest traffic and with an accumulation of mostly taller buildings, the square is strategically designed to contrast these corridors in an interesting rhythm. In a context where surrounding buildings…

WILHELMINAPLEIN, LEEUWARDEN, THE NETHERLANDS Client: Leeuwarden Municipal Council Landscape architects: HOSPER landscape architecture and urban design (Mark van der Heide, Hanneke Kijne, Marike Oudijk, Petrouschka Thumann, Han Konings) Collaborators: SmitsRinsma; THE LUX LAB; Rots Maatwerk; IPV Delft; Falco BV, Leeuwarden Municipal Council (Bert Bandringa); DVJ; V.d.Berk; Enexis Area: 7,800 square metres Implementation: 2011 – 2012 This article by Peter Paul Witsen was published in the “Yearbook Landscape Architecture and Urban Design in The Netherlands 2014”, Blauwdruk Publisher. The Yearbook 2014 and the Yearbook 2013 are available from www.uitgeverijblauwdruk.nl. The design of Wilhelminaplein in Leeuwarden by Bureau Hosper is the last part of the Nieuw-Zaailand project, which has transformed a bleak market square above an underground car park into a highquality public gathering space. The oversized space has been reduced by…

Existant Projet Concorde, Étoile, Bastille … Paris is famous for its squares. The Place de la République is one of its most emblematic and has been completely remodelled. A space both of representation and demands, it has been radically transformed from a vast traffic roundabout where the car was king into a chiefly pedestrianised zone. Since its completion in 2013, following two years of building work, Parisians have been able to engage in a whole range of activities thanks to the provision of a platform that is open to everyone. The square’s dimensions have finally come to light, allowing for meetings, encounters and other manifestations, such as the historic march that took place on 11 January 2015. The design of the Place de la République is directly linked to the…

An elderly lady, leaning on her wheeled walker, makes her way down Marktstrasse in Warburg and sits herself down on a bench. “What I’ve been able to do here today, I haven’t done very often. Shopping without constantly having to manoeuvre my walker up and down. At last all the pavements are flush, and it looks much better without tarmac. I never thought I’d see the day, it’s absolutely wonderful.” She could have taken legal action to enforce her right to problem free shopping, according to Article 3 of the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany which states: “No person shall be disfavoured because of disability.” Various other laws such as the Disability Discrimination Act, regional building codes or Model Building Regulations and Article 9 of the UN…

“The social life of the square is the primary driver of sustainable design for this community. The square offers a great many seating and other opportunities for active inhabitation. This seems to have been accepted almost immediately with local people, and serves the many cultures already using the square, who value the opportunity to sit in larger groups and to socialise in truly urban ways that reflect the origins of ancient cultures of many lands who have come to Dandenong. Sustainable design often focuses on raw technical criteria, but here the square functions to evidence Dandenong’s commitment to cultural diversity and a welcoming spirit that is the hallmark of Australian public life. Here everyone can have a fair go, and the square creates a unique civic tableau that has already…