Subterranean Material

The Bamboo Garden, Parc de la Villette, Paris
Designed by Alexandre Chemetoff

Anita Berrezbeitia and Linda Pollak write about this project in Inside Outside as a garden conceived out of material considerations as opposed to organizational form.  In this case, the material is water and soil (the entire garden is subterranean, with massive retaining walls carrying water through its highly visible weep holes), and pre-existing infrastructure, again, carrying water through the park.  I've never been, but I imagine the experience of this garden is incredibly visceral-- feeling the cool water weeping from the walls, ducking under concrete culverts and weaving in and out of dense bamboo clusters.

Weed Mania, Unearthing Ground

Valdefierro Park, Zaragoza, Spain
Design by Hector Hernandex Elora and Manuel Fernandez Ramirez

Not sure how this place will evolve, but the freshly tilled and expansive dirt ground suggests either the potential future for orderly planting or the colonization of millions of once dormant seeds pulled up from the ground.

While tilling provides a fresh and fluffy slate for easy planting, it also provides buried seeds with the opportunity for germination with very little competition.  According to North Caroline State University Cooperative Extension, up to 3,068 seeds may reside in 1 sq ft of the top 6 inches of soil.

While it seems unlikely that these architects will allow for the wild and unkempt colonization of this austere and structural landscape, I love to imagine the contrast of these materials.  Lest I forget to mention, the concrete walls were created from the previous substance of the site, a gravel pit and then landfill for the city's building rubble.  The project speaks to an unearthing of the earth, from the restructuring of the geologic to the unraveling of emergent vegetation of a decommissioned ground.  I wonder how much of the new landscape's soil was brought into the site.

Future Exploration.... Bill Morrish's Civilizing Terrains...on monuments as dug up and restructured geology... wonderful drawings

Botanic Garden, Extruded Wild

One of the major influences for this research is French landscape architect and gardener extraordinaire Gilles Clement.  Pictured above, Deborence Island is a massive concrete and rubble structure 7m high in Parc Henri Mattise in Lille, France.  The island is inaccessible to people, yet absurdly urban-- in the middle of a park in the city, created from the rubble of urban soils and deconstructed ground, filled with plants seeded by the wind, urban birds, possibly planted(?).  A model of constructed wild, the island appears to have extruded from the ground from the underworld or a chunk of the Garden of Eden plopped right into a crisply maintained public French park.   

A representation and growing model of wild.  I love the squareness of it, a collected sampling and redistribution of botanic diversity, a contemporary Padua.