Duisburg Nord Landschaftspark

A steelworks has been transformed into a landscape park which is unlike any other in Europe. It is the result of a competition-winning design, by Peter and Anna-Liese Latz, influenced by deconstructionist philosophy. The binary pairs of park:waste, process:product and art:nature are inverted. Each privileged term is upset: waste becomes park, product becomes process, nature becomes art. Three types of recycling underly the park design. First, buildings are re-cycled. Blast furnaces become accessible 'follies'; concrete tanks become walled gardens; water tanks become water gardens. Second, soil-forming materials are recycled. If an industrial process left a strange soil mixture then plants which can colonise it are encouraged. Third, water is recycled.