Building becomes landscape, landscape becomes building

The Groene Stad lay on four islands at the centre of the Floriade grounds. A typically Dutch landscape had been laid out: an intensively built-up ‘urban’ culture landscape, a meadow landscape, a nature landscape, and a water landscape. The buildings consistently entered into a special relationship with the landscapes.

In the largest building, the Gelaagde Stad (Layered City), the landscape had been incorporated into the building. With roof gardens, vertical gardens, and gardens in and under the building, a demonstration was given as to how a green landscape can be introduced in a densely built urban environment. The assignment was also seized upon to devise new temporary structures: the ‘bare’ building was a construction of scaffolding material and Stelcon plates. Several remarkably coloured, closed volumes had been incorporated into this structure, one of which possessed the archetypical form of a house.

The reverse takes place when a building merges with the landscape and is even partly adopted into it. This was the case with the Information Pavilion, which was largely hidden under an (elevated) meadow landscape. The pavilion was enclosed by sheet piling on three sides, against which embankments had been constructed on the exterior. On the inside, the sheet piling served as exhibition walls.

The Leemhuis (Clay House) and the Boomhuis (Tree House) represented the third category: the building and the landscape coincided. In the Boomhuis, tree trunks were used as columns that bore a structure with panorama platforms. The curved walls of the Leemhuis were made of stacked bales of straw coated with clay. Showcases arose by omitting a bale now and again. The traditional thatched roof was partly opened up to allow sufficient light into the interior where, appropriately, an exhibition on building with rapidly producible (short-cycle) building materials had been laid out.

Text: Olaf Koekebakker from monography DP6. Ten Years of Architecture