Category Archives: Asian gardens and landscapes

Report on Tiananmen Square Landscape Architecture Competition

13 Replies


An international Web 2.0 design competition for Tiananmen Square was announced in March 2009. The winners are listed below. A full .pdf report on the Tiananmen competition is available for free download from the Gardenvisit.com Website. All the Tiananmen entries can be seen on Flickr. The 3 judges, listed below, thank everyone who took part.

• Christine Storry (Australia): architect and urban designer
• Tom Turner (UK): landscape architect and town planner
• Xiru Zhao (China): architect

First prize: Thunsdorff

Thunsdorff, Ueli Mueller Landscape Design, Kleinertstrasse 3, 8037 Zurich, Switzerland, mail @ uelimueller.ch, www.uelimueller.ch
The Thunsdorff design is visually strong, deceptively simple and a complex response to the site. A Moon Gate has historic, symbolic and garden interest. The people’s encyclopedia (Wikipedia) states that:

A Moon Gate (Chinese: 月亮门; pinyin: yuèliàng mén) is a circular opening in a garden wall that acts as a pedestrian passageway, and a traditional architectural element in Chinese gardens. Moon Gates have many different spiritual meanings for every piece of tile on the gate and on the shape of it. The sloping roofs of the gate represent the half moon of the Chinese Summers and the tips of the tiles of the roof have talisman on the ends of them…. The purpose of these gates is to serve as a very inviting entrance into gardens of the rich upper class in China. The gates were originally only found in the gardens of wealthy Chinese nobles.
The Chinese word for round (圆，yuan) has the same pronunciation as the Chinese word for ‘garden’ (园，yuan). Another meaning of ‘yuan’ in Chinese is ‘perfect’ （圆满）- which is a symbol representing the owner of a garden who wishes to conduct himself perfectly and work smoothly. The placement of the Moon Gate in Tiananmen Square creates two spaces with a pedestrian link and, alluding to them as two different gardens. There could be problems for traffic on Changan Street and obstruction of the visual axis from the Tiananmen Gate. A vehicular underpass would also be possible. The great Moon Gate can symbolise the ancient desire for Harmony and Unity – and the fact that modern China belongs to all of its people and no longer  to a rich upper class. Thunsdorff explains the design in thirty words:
China – Country of grand spirit -The world’s largest square shall remain an open space – We suggest a new perspective link between past and present pointing to the future – Heavenly Peace
There may be something of Confucius in this (‘Study the past if you would define the future’) and also something of Chairman Mao (‘Such is history, such is the history of civilization for thousands of years’). The idea of a sublime symbol soaring above the commercialism of modern Beijing is attractive, with something of a parallel in the Parisian Grande Arche. The comparison between the Ming dynasty axis in Beijing and the Louvre-Defense axis in Paris is interesting – and both can be carried into the future as examples of how city form can be conserved and extended. They support the view that 600 years is a good timescale for city planning: one should look back at least 300 years and look forward at least for another 300 years.

Second Prize  Aga H

Aga H Agnieszka Hubeny-Zukowska, Pracownia Sztuki Ogrodowej, 80-360 Gdańsk Ul.Krzywoustego 5A/5, Poland, Tel./fax: +48 (58) 511-04-69 www.pracowniasztukiogrodowej.pl biuro [@] pracowniasztukiogrodowej.pl

Aga H

A garden underneath Tiananmen Square

The Aga H design proposes a context-sensitive underground design which retains the integrity of Tiananmen Square as a huge and yet balanced space. The underground ‘garden world’ also responds to the context of a climate which is too hot in summer and too cold in winter. Aga H sees great value in traditional Chinese design but, as a world city, argues that Beijing can also symbolise a modern approach to design. To leave space for great events and to avoid competition with older buildings, the surface level therefore remains ’empty’. At ground level the main change would be two great blocks of pleached trees with seating beneath. They would flank the Monument to the People’s Heroes and the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong. A glass-roofed space beneath Tiananmen Square would contain a garden world and a Center for History, Art and Science. There would be underground links to the National Museum of China and the Great Hall of the People.



Third Prize: Whitney Hedges

Whitney Hedges, garden designer and landscape architect, England,  www.whitneyhedges.co.uk polkadotplants @ googlemail.com
Only eighteen words of explanation were given (‘One Light: Strong lights projecting upwards, set flush into paving. Commemorating those who fell in the 1989 demonstrations’) but more points arose in an online discussion: ‘I like Whitney Hedges design very much… it is sensitive to all the considerations for this site and yet is quite a dramatic statement of the individuals heroic messages’. ‘One could also say that it links Earth to Heaven, which was the traditional role of Chinese Emperors (they were Sons of Heaven)’. ‘ I’m not sure that mixing these images of the Speer’s “Cathedral of Light” at the Nuremberg Rally with the image of the Tiananmen Square is a very good idea’. The reference to Speer is both interesting and troubling.

Is this the landscape of future architecture?

9 Replies

Should one call this architecture or landscape architecture or neither or both? It is a competition entry for 2010 Competition Entry for International Business Center with an Intercontinental Hotel in Yerevan. The designer explains: ‘Instead of a towering Iconic image, disconnected from historic, horizontal Yerevan, Lace Hill stitches the adjacent city and landscape together to support a holistic, ultra-green lifestyle, somewhere between rural hillside living and dense cultured urbanity’. The images are good but, if I were one of the judges, I would want to see some cross-sections and floor plans before awarding a prize.

image courtesy Forrest Fulton

Modernist planning and design for Shanghai's urban landscape

17 Replies

How could the urban landscape design have been done better?


If you look carefully at the pavilion-ettes on top of some of the buildings, you can tell this is a Chinese city. But I see the photograph as an illustration of the way in which context-insensitive modernist design theory is laying waste the ancient cities of China. There a surviving patch of the old city form in the foreground and glitch of marching blocks in the background. It is easy to criticise – but given the available resources, how could things have been done better? As suburban Shanghai demonstrates beyond the realms of doubt, they could certainly be a lot worse! The simplest change is that the blocks should be substantially vegetated: on roofs, balconies and walls. Shanghai is a warm wet city and this would be an adaptation to the geographical context. This policy is being adopted in a wealthy and Chinese-influenced city: Singapore.

(image courtesy leonardo_bonnani)


CH3-893.jpg

Originally uploaded by herwigphoto.com


Sustainable management of grass in Islamic gardens

4 Replies

Sustainable management of grass in Islamic gardens This lovely photograph was taken by Michael Lancaster c1968. My first thought, on finding it this morning, was that is showed a sustainable approach to cutting grass. But do the water buffalos emit more C02 than the small amount of hydrocarbon a motor mower would use? Perhaps. But the buffalo C02 would be endlessly re-cycled and the fossil hydrocarbon would be transferred from the earth’s crust to the earth’s atmosphere. Another point evident from Michael’s photograph is that this is not how the greenspace should be managed. It ought to be a lush area of fruit and flowers.

Context-sensitive design in the Middle East and the Arab countries

3 Replies
Should more develoments in the Middle East look like this?

Should more develoments in the Middle East look like this?

HOW to produce context-sensitive design is a very considerable problem – and the Madinat Jumeriah Hotel in Dubai is a case in point:
1. the character of the design is unmistakably West Asian (though more Persian than Arabian)
2. the design style is popular with both Arab and European visitors
3. I would rather stay in this hotel than in an Anywhere Style modern block
4. I guess the idea of building in this style would be condemned in most of the world’s architecture schools, by most of the world’s architects and by most of the world’s architectural critics
5. wind-towers (badgirs) were a brilliant Persian contribution to the art of air conditioning, but the badgirs in the photographs are fakes, probably used for mechanical plant or as storage space for crates of beeri
6. it is completely non-traditional to surround Arab palaces with water – and the Madinat Jumeriah Hotel does not exemplify a sustainable approach to hydrological design
7. the planting design style in the hotel gardens is more authentic than in the great majority of surviving Islamic gardens, though it is quite a way from the tradition of uderplanted palm orchards


So is the Madinat Jumeriah Hotel in Dubai an example to follow or an example to avoid? (10 re architectural design? (2) re landscape and garden design? (3) re use of materials and detailed design?

See note: How should a design project relate to its context?

Courting the lawn

9 Replies

It is always a challenge when considering heritage how to respect the past while accommodating the new. The houtongs in Beijing are now facing the predicament of a modernising city. Traditional society and lifestyles have changed. Consumer demands are different.

So the traditional courtyard house is being reinterpreted…and in some instances modernism and tradition are facing each other quite literally.

However, there is much to be gained from understanding the tradition of the courtyard house and the patterns of life which gave rise to it. The garden of the courtyard house seems to have been predominantly a place for trees.. but perhaps also for lawn?