From The New Yorker: Urban green spaces are becoming the new architecture stars.
Landscape today often abandons the fantasy of playing Mother Nature to achieve spectacular designs that flaunt their manufactured underpinnings, enticing architects to cross over from buildings to the spaces around them.
The half-mile-long Superkilen park, in Copenhagen, designed by BIG Architects, Topotek 1, and Superflex, places miniature rolling green hills, a pink patchwork market square, and star-shaped Moroccan-tile fountains into one of the city’s most diverse neighborhoods. Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay, designed by Grant Associates, Wilkinson Eyre, and Atelier Ten, is landscape as entertainment, with a grove of steel Supertrees, overgrown with plants, that provide shade during the day and light up at night.
In the Cloud Forest, under a glass dome that resembles Santiago Calatrava’s recently opened Oculus, in lower Manhattan, a thirty-five-metre waterfall crashes down the side of a cone-shaped mountain. Parks have become the new architecture stars, perfectly suited for our green and community-seeking age.
Building the pergola, in Utrecht’s Máximapark, involved the local community.
