A Celebration of Texture: Sometimes the Bumpy Bits are the Most Interesting

Have you ever noticed the way reviewers will sometimes describe a book, or a film, or a character's life as being "richly textured".

This often seems to be shorthand for "they're up their ears in so much half-baked, chicken-with-its-head-cut-off, crazy-ass craziness, they don't know if they're coming or going".

As someone who has known a moment or two of richly textured life in my time, I thought it high time we trained our laser-like focus on the beauty and delight of the textures that surround us.

When so much of our lives is about streamlining and smoothing out the bumps, it's good to remember that the bumpy bits are often the most interesting.

The texture of things catches the light and the rain. Textures can invite or repel. Textures can be experienced with our eyes, our hands, our feet...and whatever else you're up for. The texture of things is critical to how we experience the spaces around us.

So that's it. Please enjoy this small collection of wonderfully textured paths, pavements, walls, artworks and plants. 

Textures evoke emotional responses: is this just a gate made of twigs or a doorway to Narnia?

What happens when stone walls don't shave for a few months...

Raw, robust, recycled concrete used as mulch. Mmmm.

You should by now be aware of my obsession with all things mossy. If I ever met Kate she'd be in trouble...

The forms of these succulents create a richly textured living carpet.

If the walls could talk...

If you've been to MONA in Hobart, you would have been as besotted as I with the gasp-inducing subterranean gallery carved out of the sandstone.

Runoff water follows the curve of this multi-textured stone spiral.

It's that magical public art from Portland again. The fineness of the inscribed linework contrasts beautifully with the heavy planes of the rock surface.

These pieces of stone look like they've been worn smooth by the water passing over.

The skill of great mosaic work: transforming hundreds of tiny pieces of sharp cut glass into a sensuous smooth curve.

The patina, colour and waving form of this weathered steel screen all create a sinuous, dynamic texture.

Radiating, pleating, folding...

The solid waxy texture of these aeoniums gives them the appearance of living sculptures.

Wim Delvoye's 'Concrete Truck' creates texture out of thin air...

The column is encircled in pebbles that look as if they're precariously balanced on top of each other: they're smooth so you want to touch, but it looks risky!

How many things would this old post have seen in its former undersea life?

I love plants that look deceptively spiky but have sneakily soft foliage.

Doesn't the sun kissing the windswept pennisetum make you want to get your cambric shift on and go all Kate Bush?

The softness of wet sand washed into braided wave patterns.

John Wardle Architects compose textures with bricks as musicians do with notes.

What did you think? Any favourites? Maybe there was a texture you hadn't considered before. I'd love to hear, so please let me know in the comments below.

And of course if you know someone else who'd enjoy this little dose of inspiration, feel free to share it.

Thanks for reading, and come back soon for more from the wonderful world of inspirational landscapes.

Free at Last: Martin Luther King's Atlanta Resting Place

This week marks the 50th anniversary of I Have A Dream.

The epoch-defining speech was given by Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, on the 28th of August 1963. It came at the end of the ‘March on Washington’, a monumental civil rights demonstration attended by a quarter of a million people, and widely acknowledged as a tipping point in the US civil rights movement, being followed in 1964 by the passing of the Civil Rights Act, and in 1965 by the Voting Rights Act.

Tragically, only five years later the dream was over. King, the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, and champion of non-violent resistance was shot and killed outside the Lorraine Motel, in Memphis.

Dr King’s funeral was held in Atlanta, at the Ebenezer Baptist Church where his father had been preacher. 

The Church still exists on Auburn Avenue, a block from the house where King was born and grew up.

The house and church both form part of the Martin Luther King, Jr National Historic Site.

Also forming part of the site is The King Center, containing a remarkable archive of King’s writing, speeches and papers, and a visitor centre, where it is impossible to remain unmoved upon confronting the battered timber wagon on which King’s body was transferred to Southview Cemetery.

Across the road is the crypt where his remains were reinterred in 1970, and where, in 2006, his widow Coretta was finally reunited with her husband. 

I imagine the crypt of Georgia marble shines hopefully in the sun, but it stands with muted despair on less temperate days.

Few others were in attendance when I visited, which allowed lengthy and quiet contemplation, but also admitted a pinprick of fear that maybe the efforts of King and his contemporaries have been ever-so-slightly forgotten. But no, surely it's just the lateness of the hour and the threatening skies keeping them away.

The King Center has organised a programme of rolling events to celebrate the anniversary. Thousands of people have already made or started the journey to be in Washington this week. At the Lincoln Memorial, the place from where King delivered his address is marked with an inscription. The path to the front door of his childhood home is similarly identified. 

As we celebrate his remarkable oratory this week, the somber white crypt in a quiet Atlanta street, reminds us all how that The Dream was cut short, and how half a century later, for many it remains unrealised.

The Martin Luther King, Jr National Historic Site is located at 449 Auburn Avenue, NE
 Atlanta, Georgia. More information, including the excellent online archive, is available at the King Center website.

Listen to the speech here.

Zollverein: the World's Most Beautiful Colliery

Last week the 2013 Think Brick awards were announced.

Brick has been undergoing somewhat of a renaissance here amongst designers. Perhaps it’s a simple case of today’s generation of architects discovering and appreciating the many super stylin’ brick houses created by great Australian architects at the peak of their game in the 1960s and 70s. (Treat yourself to a flick through Living and Partly Living if you need refreshing or convincing).

Whatever the reason, brick is suddenly ‘in’ again.

All this thinking about brick got me musing about the astonishing collection of buildings that make up the Zollverein World Heritage Site in Essen, Germany.

Essen is in the country’s central far west, part of the Emscher and Ruhr valleys that were the epicenter of Germany industrialisation.

Fuelled by extensive coal deposits, the collieries and steelworks of the region were critical to wartime armament production, and then to the post-war economic boom of the 1950s and 60s.  As settlements and people followed industry and employment, this became the most densely populated area in the Ruhr valley.

Zollverein was established in 1847, when Franz Haniel bought and amalgamated 14 coalfields north of Essen. By the late 1920s the Haniel family company had been through several mergers, eventually becoming part of the largest steel group in Europe.

As tends to happen in these situations, hugely ambitious production and cost saving goals were set for Zollverein, and the plant underwent a major redevelopment.

Here’s where it starts to get interesting. 

Architects Fritz Schupp and Martin Kremmer were engaged to design all the above-ground structures.  Yes, even though the company was pursuing cost savings. Brilliant!

Working closely with the mine’s engineers, Schupp and Kremmer replanned the site, with a ‘production axis’ and an ‘energy axis’ intersecting at a large court in front of the main shaft building and pithead. 

The functions of the site also influenced the architectural design. A system of steel framed structures, with brick and glass weather screens, was developed for the pit buildings, which, despite their different functions, all had to provide long clear spans and bear heavy vertical loads. 

A refined and austere collection of steel framed and brick clad buildings was the result. 

Adapting this system to each building gave a strong sense of order to to the site.

Contrasting the simple cubic forms was the mighty pit head itself, expressed in an open steel structure of great elegance. 

When the new Zollverein opened in 1932 it quickly earned the title of ‘The Most Beautiful Colliery in The World’. I think that was a pretty fair call.

In the 1970s Germany started to become less competitive in the global coal market.  By the late-1980s it was all over: mines, smelters, refineries, coking plants and blast furnaces all closed their doors and were silent. The last shift went down the Zollverein pit shaft in 1986. The coking plant closed in 1993.

The owners planned to clear the site. Many others fought to save it, and at the end of 1986 the entire shaft site was heritage listed. The state of Rhine-Westphalia bought the site from the city of Essen and from 1989 to 1999 it was rehabilitated and redeveloped.

Today Zollverein is the cultural and artistic centerpiece of the Ruhr region, with the 55 metre high former pit head standing sentinel over the place.

Rem Koolhaas’s office, OMA, completed a master plan for the site in 2002.  The landscape master plan was the work of Agence Ter.

The coal washing plant, the largest building on the site, was converted into a Visitor Centre and houses the Ruhr Museum. Details in the loooong stair and escalator are inspired by flowing molten steel.

The Zollverein School of Design and Management occupies a building designed by Saanaa. Its pristine sugarcube form is inspired by the existing cubic structures.

Nearby parts of the site look to have run wild.

Many of the older buildings are still off limits, awaiting their appointment with the makeover squad. 

Just across the road (ie: take a packed lunch for your walk) is the former coking plant, a stupendous, 400 metre long affair trailing tentacles of pipes and gangways. 

Visitors are dwarfed by the [insert superlative of choice here] structure. 

At ground level, old machinery and equipment has been replaced by a Versaille-scale water body. 

In winter there is skating! 

In summer you can take a dip in the pool... 

...or peek into the shipping containers holding the water below. 

The rebirth of Zollverein coincided with the International Building Exhibition Emscher Park (the IBA), a ten year state government initiative tasked with achieving the ecological, economic, and urban revitalization of the Emscher River and Ruhr Valley.

One of the IBA’s radical development philosophy was the proposal that everything from the predominantly industrial past was worth preserving.

Visiting Zollverein today doesn't just bring you face-to-face with beautiful architecture, fine landscape architecture, and evocative ruins. It reveals a hugely important site of economic production that was previously off-limits except to its workers. It shows the power of vision and commitment to work with existing redundant infrastructure, and create viable new uses. And it works not just as a stand-along monument, but as a vital, and extraordinary link in a vast regional industrial landscape.

Now it’s over to you.

What do you think of the steel, brick and glass building treatment at Zollverein? Do you think Zollverein provides any clues for how we might think about mining and industrial sites here in Australia? Are there any that have been designed as proud civic buildings, or as part of a deliberate assemblage? What are our plans for our extractive industry sites once mining finishes?

I’d love to know your thoughts – join the conversation in the comments section below.

If you know someone who’d enjoy reading this article be sure to share it, and check back soon for more from the wonderful world of landscape, architecture and design.

Image credits:

Aerial view showing pit head and Saanaa building beyond

Image by Victor Bayon

File licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Image retrieved from http://www.flickr.com/photos/formalfallacy/3641897195/sizes/l/in/photolist-6xPF9X-6xPfHt-6xPg5x-6xTPCN-6xT5nq-6xTPaL-6xT4JQ-6xPdAx-8yeLeV-8yeLJR-8yhNNy-8yhQ19-8yhQKN-8yhQpN-8yhN25-cqAaWm-9BbSDL-9BbR9u-9B8Yht-9B8YD2-5hDy4q-6y3o58-7HxSB2-5hzbNx-eAUc6r-eAUcEv-eAXky7-arKUrd-arKUEU-bkvTiK-4bumjE-7MYTn1-9saLzd-9s7MMR-9saLAG-aCaTKJ-7VKS4w-4bpqCi-8Gzqvy-8Gsvng-8GvG5Y-8GvBr5-a7krWL-5hzaXe-8rSi74-dkhf64-8rSebH-3uMKpW-3uMKNN-8EyfWg-4bq2fV/ on 10.08.13

Night skating

Image by Felix Montino

File licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

Image retrieved from http://www.flickr.com/photos/felixmontino/5305887665/sizes/l/in/photolist-95S4xP-gmH1L-5tKoXS-8seasf-apzPuZ-3uHgZH-9nw1ka-dRE3ZR-dKryhL-dJgCxw-6xPF9X-6xPfHt-6xPgpR-6xPg5x-6xTPCN-6xT5nq-6xTPaL-6xT4JQ-6xPdAx-8yeLeV-8yeLJR-8yhNNy-8yhQ19-8yhQKN-8yhQpN-8yhN25-cqAaWm-9BbSDL-9BbR9u-9B8Yht-9B8YD2-5hDy4q-6y3o58-6h6Q1U-7HxSB2-5hzbNx-eAUc6r-eAUcEv-eAXky7-arKUrd-arKUEU-bkvTiK-7zY15z-7zY15V-rAm9x-8MaSHK-8Gzqvy-8Gsvng-8GvG5Y-8GvBr5-a7krWL/ on 10.08.13

All other images by A. J. Wright and R. A. Buchanan.

Find out more about Zollverein:

Zollverein is located at Gelsenkirchener Straße 181, 45309 Essen, Germany. Its English-version website is currently being updated, but there is still some good basic info available. The German site is available at the same link.

I Don't Like Flowers. Can I Still Have a Garden?

If you saw the story on the Garfield Park Conservatory City Garden in Chicago, you couldn’t have failed to notice the riot of spring flowers erupting at every turn. 

Flowers are all around us; helping plants (and people!) get their groove on.

I remember being sent two dozen new season peonies once, by a lovely man who looked exactly like Daniel Craig in Casino Royale.  Actually, no, that never happened. Focus, Landscapology.

But what happens if you’re not that keen on flowers?

I don’t mean if you have sinus-shattering allergies, or you break out in hives if you come within cooee of a chrysanthemum. I mean what if you just plain don’t like ‘em, can’t stand ‘em, and don’t want them in your park or garden?

Does it mean you’re a bad person, willfully denying yourself and others oceans of horticultural pleasure? 

No, of course not!

What is does mean though, is that you’ll have to be a whole lot more selective when choosing plants.

There are two types of plants available to you.

The first are the true non-flowering ones. Whilst nearly all plants use flowers to help them beget more plants, some ancient plant families do not use flower power at all.

Mosses are flowerless plants that are incredibly beautiful, but often overlooked. Worse, they are sometimes dismissed as undesirable, and blasted out of their quiet lives in wall and paving joints, or under trees. I have quite a thing for moss, and can't resist patting its velvety verdure whenever given the chance. If mosses thrive where you are, why not embrace their delicate beauty.

The original 'green wall': moss cascades down a rock face at Fallingwater in Pennsylvania.

Delicate filaments catch the light on top of this wall at the Medellin Botanic Gardens.

Like mosses, ferns do not have flowers, but reproduce using spores.

From the delicate fronds of this hanging fern...

...to the tough leaves of the birds nest.

Conifers are also plants that do not have flowers. In Australia, the kauri, huon, hoop and bunya pines are just a few of the conifers that reproduce using seeds rather than flowers.

The unmistakable form of the mighty Bunya Pine.

The second type of plants increases the options considerably, but may not be strictly by-the-book for the botanical and horticultural purists amongst us. Just so you know.

Included here are those that produce very insignificant flowers, flowers that ‘don’t look like flowers’, or those that flower incredibly infrequently.

The following represents just a tiny selection of plants in this category.

Palms are grown for their foliage rather than their tiny flowers. When they do get around to it, some palms also bloom only once, at the end of their lives. 

Grasses have fine foliage in a range of colours and textures, and many have feathery flowers that ‘don’t look like flowers’, helping you get around your self-imposed flower ban.

Many succulents have tiny flowers, or a very short bloom time. (Some are totally OTT though, so choose carefully). 

Agaves are succulents that grow for years and flower but once, in a spectacular vertical eruption that is not for the faint-hearted. Following this the plant dies. Until then they are sculptural, hardy, and flower-free. 

Culinary herbs all produce flowers. During the growing season we usually want to encourage the production of more aromatic foliage by pinching out any flower buds as they emerge. At the end of the season you can avert your eyes, let the plants flower, then look back in time for them to go to seed and pop off the twig. 

Finally, the composition of different types of foliage plants can produce incredible results. Tightly clipped hedges form the structure of the Green Dock at Thames Barrier Park. Whilst some flowering plants do make an appearance, it is the grasses and foliage plants of many forms and colours that are the main attraction. 

Similarly at Landschaftspark Duisburg Nord, hedges form an important part of this garden, but so do the rampant climbers displaying their look-at-me seasonal colour change. 

But you know better than me!

Wherever you are in Australia or around the world, what plants would you suggest for our anti-flower friends out there? If you're a flower-averse reader we'd love to hear from you too!

Share the love in the comments section. Of course if you know someone else who’d enjoy this story, be sure to pass it along, and to check back soon for more landscape inspiration.

A Park with Great Ideas for Home Gardens

Most designers, art lovers and recent visitors to Chicago will be familiar with Millennium Park.

A special project of former mayor Richard M. Daley, Millennium Park converted a vast lakefront railyard into a spectacular public parkland. Leading architects, artists and landscape architects including Frank Gehry, Anish Kapoor and Kathryn Gustafson were amongst those involved in bringing Daley’s Millennium Park vision to reality.

Less well known today is Garfield Park. Located in Chicago’s west side, it was opened in 1874, one of three great western parks and pleasure grounds built for this part of the city.

Jens Jensen, acknowledged as the pioneer of prairie-style landscape architecture, (yep, landscape's Frank Lloyd Wright) was superintendent of the western parks system, implementing many significant architectural and landscape projects at Garfield Park.

The focal point of the park is the Conservatory, particularly the ornate and popular Palm Room. One of the largest in the United States, the conservatory encloses over 18,200m2. It's a lovely place to take a turn around, and I can imagine it being quite the destination in its day.

Sadly, a 2011 hailstorm damaged large sections of glass in the display and production greenhouses, and repairs to some parts of the buildings are still underway. 

Behind the conservatory lies a new park.

The City Garden aims to provide additional parkland and green linkages in this park of the city.

The central organizing element is a large lawn. Its elliptical shape is a tip of the hat to a shape that Jens Jensen once used to define spaces within Garfield Park.

View fullsize

Beginning the journey around the great lawn.

A large landform wraps around one edge of the lawn. From its summit, the dramatic Chicago skyline is visible in the distance.

The lawn tilts up into an encircling landform.

The 442 metre, 108 storey Willis Tower, (the artist formerly known as the Sears Tower) can be seen above the Palm House.

Different plant communities thrive in the varying conditions – shady and protected, sunny and exposed, flat or sloping. They enclose the lawn, frame the Palm House and shield the working conservatories. 

Small paths weave their way through the planting, like streams braiding their way to the lake.

A gravel garden allows you to steps off the paths altogether. Here, the entire ground surface is gravel, interspersed with flecks of blue glass. Plants that tolerate hot, dry environments take centre stage. Oh my hat, don't they look spectacular in the summer sun.

A lily pond, empty for cleaning and maintenance when I visited, is off to the side, and traversed by a bridge.

The bridge continues the curve of the great lawn.

Details on the bridge are repeated elsewhere, particularly those using reinforcing steel as columns to support plants and climbers. I love the way the endcaps on the reo towers almost seem to reference details from Frank Lloyd Wright Midway Gardens, another great Chicago landscape, now sadly lost.

Heading back to the great glass conservatory you pass by a childrens’ garden, rows of tiny plastic shovels at the ready. 

Finally, there is a great bluestone terrace, looking out over the entire landscape.

The big Chicago sky sits above the big green lawn. Yet strolling the City Garden allows the beauty of every individual plant to be experienced up close.

What do you think?

What aspects of the City Garden would you consider using in other parks and gardens? Could the gravel garden be created using crushed recycled concrete instead? Would you consider using the reinforcing cages as sculptural plant supports? And what about the idea of using different types of pathways to encourage different ways of moving through the garden?

I’d love you to leave a comment below letting me know.

If you know someone who’d enjoy reading this article be sure to share it, and check back soon to visit another Great Park.

Garfield Park Conservatory and City Garden is located at 300 North Central Park Avenue,
Chicago. Read more about the park’s history, activities, events, how to get there, and ways to be involved in the conservancy at the Garfield Park Conservatory website.

The City Garden was designed by Hoerr Schaudt.

Serenity...in the Least Likely Location

What’s the least likely place for a park that you can imagine?

Next to a busy freeway perhaps? On top of a rubbish dump?

How about next door to a sewage treatment plant?

The Newtown Creek Nature Walk in Brooklyn not only ekes out a sliver of public access to a contested waterfront, but brings visitors face-to-face with the biggest sewage treatment plant in New York City.

George Trakas was engaged to bring an artful approach to developing the nature walk.  A distinguished artist with significant experience working in complex waterfront sites, Trakas has twice received National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and is a medal winner for sculpture from the American Society of Arts and Letters, which honoured his unique “vision of landscape”.

Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant is a dramatic and exciting assembly of pipes and tubes and shiny things, lit an otherwordly purple at night, and all dominated by four enormous pieces of industrial-Faberge-chic. These are the symbolic and literal centrepiece of the plant: referred to in the industry as ‘digestor eggs’ this is where the business end of sewage treatment takes place.  They loom over the waterway, linked together at the top with a glass-walled walkway, like a setting from Metropolis, or Gattaca, and the public applies in droves to see the eggs up close whenever the plant advertises tours.

Image by joevar. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-ND 2.0). Retrieved from http://www.flickr.com/photos/57462257@N00/4006853382/in/photolist-775aV1-775aME-7758U7-775bso-775867-775ba3-771c1n-771eAv-771gYz-771cfX-771eVX-7758p9-771dFX

If the treatment plant looks like a vision from the future, the park opposite references a time past, one where Newtown Creek flowed fresh and clear, as it did when the indigenous Lenape people made their home here.  Trakas’s artwork is multilayered and comprehensive.  Particular plant species were chosen for their cultural or historic significance, which is relayed on small plaques. 

Other interpretive signage informs visitors that rubbish bins are made in the shape of old water barrels, steps down to the water reference geological epochs... 

...as do rocks placed amongst the planting.

Newtown Creek Nature Walk is tough and robust, like the gritty waterfront precinct it fronts.  Yes, there are some trees in place now, but the overwhelming view is of industry:  big barges with cranes on them moving crushed up metal onto smaller barges with old tyres round their waterlines; big light towers, the undersides of big bridges, big billboards, big warehouse buildings - everything big and muscular. 

The detailing of the Nature Walk responds to this muscularity, with big concrete steps, sheet piling and massive bench seats. 

Within this tough exoskeleton, moments of delight are to be found.  A circular gathering point invites groups to stop by the edge...

...planting creates tall green tunnels...

...and flowers and foliage appear more brilliant against the grey stone and concrete. 

Retracing their path to the entry visitors pass through the swollen concrete walls of George Trakas’s 51 metre-long Vessel. Holes punched through the walls allow glimpses of the mechanical equipment and processes going on behind. The view straight down the centre of Vessel aligns with the Empire State Building, seemingly a world away from the unexpected tranquillity of this park-like space next to the sewage treatment plant. 

Now it’s over to you.

What do you think of the idea of public parkland in such an unusual location? Do you think the artistic overlay has resulted in a more engaging space? Leave a comment below letting me know.

If you know someone who’d enjoy reading this article be sure to share it, and check back soon for more from the wonderful world of parks, gardens and landscapes.

Details

This article is an edited extract from my book Future Park: imagining tomorrow’s urban parks, released this September by CSIRO Publishing.

The Newtown Creek Alliance is a "community-based organisation dedicated to restoring, revealing, and revitalising Newtown Creek".

The Visitor Centre at the  Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant is open by appointment.

The Treatment Plant was open as a part of Open House New York 2012.  Listings for OHNY 2013 will be released at the start of October.