Planten un Blomen - 园林吧

A24 Landschaft Landschaftsarchitektur: Between the Elbe and Alster and opposite Hamburg Messe, the city’s exhibition centre, lies Planten un Blomen — one of Hamburg’s most beloved parks, a park that enjoys an eventful history. As part of an urban reorientation and the expansion of the adjoining trade-fair grounds, the park entrance just across the street was redesigned. A new fence surrounds the nothern grounds of the park like a sash. It consists of steel plates that play with light and shade, that delimit and protect, yet allow the gaze to penetrate and provoke curiosity; for, from the outside they look deformed, as if the nature contained within the park is protesting its confinement, trying to break out.

The design confronts the ambivalence of protecting the precious park in the middle of the metropolis, while insistently beckoning visitors to a new ramp, which re-establishes the entrance to this side of the park as a clean incision. It breaks through the thick green façade of the old stock of trees, managing simultaneously to preserve this façade and to direct people’s gaze into the park. Both careful interventions create a new spatial dramaturgy between movement and rigidity, between city, nature and culture.

Landscape Architecture: A24 Landschaft Landschaftsarchitektur GmbH
Project: The Neue Messe Entrance to Planten un Blomen Hamburg
Authors: Steffan Robel
Location: Hamburg, Germany
Design and construction: 2008-2011
Area: 1,3 hectare
Budget: 1,1 million Euro
Client: Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg
Image credits: Hanns Joosten
Text by A24 Landschaft

Published on January 22, 2014