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Nature AN N E MAR I E LU N D
The concept of Nordic landscape architecture as underplayed, socially and functionally, while still being beautiful has not only been predominant, but also admired. This consensus is reinforced by the fact that Nordic furniture design, culinary skills, and architecture all ride the same wave. In the decades after World War II, with the economy very limited, Nordic landscape architects held the attitude that landscape architecture should be unobtrusive and unaffected yet still possess quality realized with a high degree of skill. They shunned flamboyance and the overdone. The expression of landscape design at the time was based on a place and its spirit—its genius loci—and most often was very green. Since then, the concept of Nordic landscape architecture as underplayed socially and functionally while being nonetheless beautiful has endured. To a large degree, Nordic landscape architecture remains based on a cherished view of nature. Due to differences in background and social structure, landscape architecture in northern Europe differs from landscape architecture in central and southern Europe— and, quite naturally, from landscape architecture in South America and Asia. But given similar topography and location, why shouldn’t Dutch landscape architecVinterviken Culture Park, Thorbjörn Andersson 1998. N AT U R E
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Site U DO WE I LACH E R
Whether people are fully conscious of this or not, they actually derive countenance and sustenance from the “atmosphere” of the things they live in or with. They are rooted in them just as a plant is in the soil in which it is planted. Frank Lloyd Wright, 1954.1
According to economists, we are now in the third phase of a digital evolution that started in 1991, the date of the first upload of a website to the World Wide Web.2 Today’s world is deeply rooted in digital technology that creates specific atmospheres and colors all human perception of landscape and nature. Therefore, it is impossible to discuss the development of landscape architecture in the last decades, especially the relationship between people and site, without considering global digitalization. The influence of digitalization on landscape architecture ranges from the major changes to human perception caused by globally disseminated stereotypical landscape images to the sophisticated digital technology in landscape design offices that promises a more accurate comprehension of complex natural systems. Huge amounts of digital data have been collected, often by satellites and drones. In Flights of Imagination: Aviation, Landscape, Design, landscape historian Sonja Dümpelmann points out that “Flight, in partic12
ular powered flight, which first developed in the early twentieth century, has changed our perspectives of the world, has transformed our perceptions and imaginations of the world, and has changed the landscape itself and the ways we design and inhabit it.” 3 The increasing use of drones is accelerating this development, particularly since small remote-controlled quadcopters equipped with digital cameras are affordable by a broad audience. Far more advanced drone technology is used to generate huge 3D point clouds, georeferenced and connected to large relational databases. Experts consider this the beginning of a completely new dimension and approach to landscape, allowing “for considerable progress in matters of landscape modeling and representation. Point Cloud Technology has become central to most methods of design and analysis, and is used regularly to produce elaborate sections, elevations, and plans from the remote sensing data.”4 But does digital high-tech equipment really help landscape architects better understand their field of operation, a certain site? Or is this just the technologically fired prolongation of a long-lasting, most likely unwinnable, chase of an ancient demon—the demon of total environmental control? Evidence gathered in the last three decades suggests that technological progress rarely leads to a more profound comprehension of a site. Without question, a remote-controlled drone view from above facilitates a distanced, scrutinizing observation of landscape, but it does not necessarily lead to greater comprehension of the hidden layers and deeper meaning of the environment, both of which can be achieved only by carefully listening to the site. The digital approach to landscape is perfectly in sync with contemporary society’s continued quest for a technological way out of an environmental crisis generated by this very same technology. Given this background, the traditional Scandinavian approach to landscape might seem anachronistic—but SITE
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Restraint MARC TREIB
Scientists have often characterized natural processes as embodying an “economy of means”: the production of maximum effects using minimal amounts of material or energy. That same description might also apply to most of the landscapes designed by Thorbjörn Andersson over a thirty-year professional career. In lectures, Andersson has frequently cited his interest in a small early-nineteenth-century book by the poet and social critic Carl Jonas Love Almqvist, whose title translates as The Significance of Swedish Poverty.1 In his text Almqvist asserts that the nation’s moral fiber and material culture derive from its being “poor”—a term he uses metaphorically to describe Sweden’s demanding environmental conditions, restricted varieties of natural resources, and, at the time of his writing, limited technology and human lifespan. In terms of landscape practice, an acceptance of “poverty” would imply that one begins by addressing the limitations placed upon a project by site, climate, technology, and budget, thereafter treating these restrictions as positive factors. While in some instances, true poverty did trouble the lives of a segment of the Swedish people, in most cases—and in the Andersson landscape—the term should be regarded as a synonym for simplicity, modesty, or restraint. As in the Nordic countries, “poverty” has also characterized the design culture of Japan, a system of values 20
that extended from its crafts to its landscape design. If Sweden has been constrained by climatic severity and granite bedrock, Japan has been shaped by heat, humidity, earthquakes, limited amounts of arable land—and from the seventeenth century until the start of the modern period, governance by sumptuary laws. Japanese designers confronted these restrictions by crafting forms and formulating spatial ideas rooted in simplicity. The aesthetic of “refined poverty,” for example, governed the making of the utensils, architecture, and gardens of the tea ceremony, where the making of virtually every aspect of the tea environment reflected reduction and refinement.2 Of course, Andersson works in a time where, in contrast to the past, resources and technologies are readily available for realizing landscape architecture. Many of his projects, in fact, have enjoyed funding sufficient to support the use of excellent materials. Yet despite the wealth of options available to him, he has often chosen to pursue a modest design rather than one marked by complexity and extravagance. Although lacking the same concern for refinement as the material culture of tea, the Arte Povera (“poor art”) movement based in 1960s Italy also represented a conscious return to the use of unremarkable materials. Often simply arranged, Arte Povera sculptures and installations represented a willful rejection of evident composition and prior aesthetic determination. What intrigued Germano Celant, the curator most closely associated with Arte Povera, was “the discovery, the exposition, the insurrection of the magic and marvelous values of nature” embodied in these works.3 Order and composition derived from situation and process. Being in the quotidian world, however, landscape architecture must address a far broader range of concerns than those governing art within or outside the gallery. Landscape architects can nonetheless carefully investigate the conditions that underlie the project and use only RESTRAINT
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Dania Park, Malmö
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Sandgrund Park, Karlstad
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Hyllie Plaza, Malmö
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Campus Park, Umeå
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Sjövik Square, Stockholm
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Novartis Physic Garden, Basel
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Textile Fashion Center, Borås
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Pond Park at LTH, Lund
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Askim Memorial Grove, Gothenburg
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Rinkeby Panorama Terrace, Stockholm Page 124 Town Hall Square, Umeå
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Dania Park, Malmö
Dania Park (Daniaparken) is located along the water’s edge of the Öresund strait that divides Sweden and Denmark. Before development the site had been a flat and barren landfill: an industrial desert of contaminated mud. Landscape qualities on the existing site were hard to identify but eventually positive aspects of a more ephemeral kind became evident: the light, horizon, long views, sky, wind, and sea. It is a place to experience weather and seasons. Those qualities served as the point of departure for the design. The immense scale of the coastal landscape is reflected in the elements of the park and their spatial disposition. The park’s principal features are the Scouts: three inclined concrete planes that intersect the rough boulder shoreline and permit park visitors to reach the sea. The Bastion, a 40 × 40-meter flat table elevated some six meters above the sea, leaves the visitor exposed to the elements, whether a harsh wind or a beautiful sunset. The Balconies—three large wooden trays—overlook the large, slightly sunken grass meadow called the Lawn, which is protected from sea winds by a double row of Swedish whitebeam trees (Sorbus intermedia) and salt-resistant shrubs (Rosa and Elaeagnus). All the features in the park turn to the sea; all activities orient toward the water. The majestic coastal landscape, adjacent more than distant, is made part of the park experience. In the design, the greater landscape has been visually borrowed into the park to celebrate the sea.
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Campus Park, Umeå
Umeå University is a young institution, founded only in the late 1960s. Here, about 35,000 students from all over the world study subjects in a broad range of disciplines. Located on the coast of the Gulf of Bothnia in the far north of Sweden, the campus stands only some 300 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle. A campus park should offer its students a variety of places that encourage informal discussions and the free exchange of ideas. In contrast to the University’s enclosed lecture halls, classrooms, and laboratories, open nonhierarchical spaces such as these support the creative interaction among students, researchers, and teachers that is critical to learning. The quality of the campus park thus supports the attractiveness and the academic activity of the University in both its educational and social programs. Campus Park at Umeå University consists of 23,000 square meters of sun decks, jetties, open lawns, walking trails, and terraces, all organized around a constructed lake. Within the lake, its principal island extends as a small archipelago with bridges that lead to the southern shore. Here the visitor meets a hilly landscape with sunny as well as shaded vales, articulated by the white trunks of birch trees. In front of the student union a lively outdoor lounge—a series of gravelled, fan-shaped terraces— orients to the sun. Each terrace is shaded by multi-trunked trees and furnished with tables and chairs that support a variety of uses.
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Pond Park at LTH, Lund
The campus of the Lund Institute of Technology (Lunds Tekniska HÜgskola, or LTH) occupies a large site, once farmland, that slopes gently to the east. The University was established here in 1961 to provide advanced learning and technical faculties, including architecture, in the Swedish south. Today the LTH offers higher education for 10,000 students. The original architect for the campus was Klas Anshelm, who laid out what is today a dozen buildings: simple, solitary red-brick volumes, independently sprinkled across the slope. The result is a handsome, if barren, campus with little to join the faculties or provide amenities for its students. The project for the Pond Park addresses these shortcomings by establishing focal points clustered around the two ponds—remnants of a clay quarry long defunct—that occupy the center of the windswept site. These former clay pits are today deep shafts cut in the ground filled with water. Compared to the flat surfaces of the surroundings, this is dramatic terrain. The slopes descending from their rims are steep, in places almost vertical. The generating concept for the new landscape was to render the steep edges of the ponds accessible in differing ways, with new construction to create socially attractive places and promenades. The western rim of the larger pond offers places to sit, enjoy the view, and meet with friends and colleagues. Sundecks and platforms are located high above the water, close to the rim of the depressions containing the ponds. The concept for the east side of the pond differs markedly. A winding promenade creates smaller social spaces, while a system of stairways moves up and down along the drop, in some places reaching all the way down to the water. 104
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