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spool - the garden in the landscape metropolis

In this issue of SPOOL Landscape Metropolis #6, designerly and discursive work on gardens in the metropolitan landscape is explored. The focus is on the garden as a theatre of landscape in the metropolis, where the city-dweller can stand face to face with natural processes, the longue durée of evolution and natural growth, silence, and open skies, as the counterpart to the excess of the urban programme. This notion of the garden as a theatre, a stage on which landscape and growth are performed, is explored by taking a closer look, spotting those places that merit attention in the vast metropolitan territory. 

A first series of contributions in this issue are academic papers that take specific cases as an entry point for an argument on the role of the garden in the metropolitan condition. These cases range from existing gardens that have adopted a new role when the context changed under the influence of metropolitan conditions, to reflections on designs that successfully operate within a metropolitan context.

Secondly, in this issue of SPOOL we have introduced the form of the visual essay: a design proposal or an artistic expression, in order to facilitate the encounter between academia and practice. Rather than the critical distance of the academic, a visual essay allows for the engaged nearness of the practitioner: the artist or the landscape architect. 

 

Land of Chabot

Our own interest in the relationship between the garden and the metropolitan landscape is expressed in the visual essay on the Land of Chabot in Rotterdam, where we describe how even a non-executed idea for a design can be a starting point to look at the metropolitan landscape in a different way. What was just a leftover piece of land is conceptualised as a garden with a “borrowed boundary”, as a means to discuss with the authorities involved the securing of a plot of land for observing the horizon within the city limits. 

In 2018 the artist group Observatorium was asked to reflect on a monument for the painter Henk Chabot, near the location of his studio on the dyke along the river Rotte. Here, a relic of farmland still exists, as a reservation for the tunnel entrance for the new A16 motorway. The Observatorium proposed to leave the land as it is, and to punctuate it by a series of acupunctural earthworks, sculptures, and a pavilion. These marks transform the undefined space into a garden, they expose the land as a valuable landscape, and bring infrastructure, city and landscape together in one perceptual unity. Although unexecuted, the design can be an instrument to change the view of the urban planners and to negotiate between a functional layout and landscape of imagination and memory.


in Spool. Journal of architecture and the built environment No.1 vol.7 2020. pp. 95-112. In collaboration with Andre Dekker.