Herzog & de Meuron and Piet Oudolf unveiled Calder Gardens design, in the Heart of Downtown Philadelphia

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Landscape designer
Collaborators
Executive architect.- The Ballinger Company.
Landscape architect.- Richard Herbert.
Area
The project will occupy 6,439 square metres and will have 1,643 square-metre of a two-storey building.
Dates
Design.- 2022.
Completion.- expected 2024.
Location
Calder Gardens site on Benjamin Franklin Parkway between 21st and 22nd Streets. Philadelphia, USA.

HERZOG & DE MEURON

Herzog & de Meuron Architekten is a Swiss architecture firm, founded and headquartered in Basel, Switzerland in 1978. The careers of founders and senior partners Jacques Herzog (born 1950), and Pierre de Meuron (born 1950), closely paralleled one another, with both attending the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich. They are perhaps best known for their conversion of the giant Bankside Power Station in London to the new home of the Tate Museum of Modern Art (2000). Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron have been visiting professors at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design since 1994 (and in 1989) and professors at ETH Zürich since 1999. They are co-founders of the ETH Studio Basel – Contemporary City Institute, which started a research programme on processes of transformation in the urban domain.

Herzog & de Meuron is a partnership led by five Senior Partners – Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, Christine Binswanger, Ascan Mergenthaler and Stefan Marbach. An international team of 38 Associates and about 362 collaborators.

Herzog & de Meuron received international attention very early in their career with the Blue House in Oberwil, Switzerland (1980); the Stone House in Tavole, Italy (1988); and the Apartment Building along a Party Wall in Basel (1988).  The firm’s breakthrough project was the Ricola Storage Building in Laufen, Switzerland (1987).  Renown in the United States came with Dominus Winery in Yountville, California (1998). The Goetz Collection, a Gallery for a Private Collection of Modern Art in Munich (1992), stands at the beginning of a series of internationally acclaimed museum buildings such as the Küppersmühle Museum for the Grothe Collection in Duisburg, Germany (1999). Their most recognized buildings include Prada Aoyama in Tokyo, Japan (2003); Allianz Arena in Munich, Germany (2005); the new Cottbus Library for the BTU Cottbus, Germany (2005); the National Stadium Beijing, the Main Stadium for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, China; VitraHaus, a building to present Vitra’s “Home Collection“, Weil am Rhein, Germany (2010); and 1111 Lincoln Road, a multi-storey mixed-use structure for parking, retail, a restaurant and a private residence in Miami Beach, Florida, USA (2010), the Actelion Business Center in Allschwil/Basel, Switzerland (2010). In recent years, Herzog & de Meuron have also completed projects such as the New Hall for Messe Basel Switzerland (2013), the Ricola Kräuterzentrum in Laufen (2014), which is the seventh building in a series of collaborations with Ricola, with whom Herzog & de Meuron began to work in the 1980s; and the Naturbad Riehen (2014), a public natural swimming pool. In April 2014, the practice completed its first project in Brazil: the Arena do Morro in the neighbourhood of Mãe Luiza, Natal, is the pioneering project within the wider urban proposal “A Vision for Mãe Luiza”.

Herzog & de Meuron have completed 6 projects since the beginning of 2015: a new mountain station including a restaurant on top of the Chäserrugg (2262 metres above sea level) in Toggenburg, Switzerland; Helsinki Dreispitz, a residential development and archive in Münchenstein/Basel, Switzerland; Asklepios 8 – an office building on the Novartis Campus in Basel, Switzerland; the Slow Food Pavilion for Expo 2015 in Milan, Italy; the new Bordeaux stadium, a 42’000 seat multifunctional stadium for Bordeaux, France; Miu Miu Aoyama, a 720 m² boutique for the Prada-owned brand located on Miyuki Street, across the road from Prada Aoyama, Tokyo, Japan.

In many projects the architects have worked together with artists, an eminent example of that practice being the collaboration with Rémy Zaugg, Thomas Ruff and with Michael Craig-Martin.

Professionally, the Herzog & de Meuron partnership has grown to become an office with over 120 people worldwide. In addition to their headquarters in Basel, they have offices in London, Munich and San Francisco. Herzog has explained, “We work in teams, but the teams are not permanent. We rearrange them as new projects begin. All of the work results from discussions between Pierre and me, as well as our other partners, Harry Gugger and Christine Binswanger. The work by various teams may involve many different talents to achieve the best results which is a final product called architecture by Herzog & de Meuron.”

Piet Oudolf

Piet Oudolf. Considered a renegade in the landscape industry, the Dutch nurseryman Piet Oudolf (1944) has revolutionized the way perennial gardens are designed and viewed in landscapes today. With a new planting style and meticulous attention detail to the plants, Oudolf has forged the ability to break the rules when his eye finds it necessary to do so.

Born on October 27th, 1944 in Haarlem, Netherlands, Piet is known for his warm, generous, and humble openness. Oudolf first discovered his passion for plants after having travelled to England in the 70’s; that trip fueled his imagination to create a different type of garden (Sorin, Gardening gone Wild). At the time, his inspiration was the much talked about Mien Ruys from the Netherlands who was best known for her work at the Tuinen Mien Ruys, a collection of thirty model gardens.

Since 1982, he has lived and worked in Hummelo, a tiny village in east Netherlands, where he started a nursery with his wife Anja, to grow perennials. His garden has since become renowned for its radical approach and ideas about planting design.

With no formal training, he designs through instinct which is inspired from nature. He notes that in a garden, symmetry is easy but balance is trickier to attain, while always seeking to understand what the intent of a design is when looking over an architect’s plan. Using the texture and form of a plant to guide much of his designs, he believes that the color of a plant will fall into place accordingly in the landscape.

It is Oudolf’s innate curiosity, horticultural knowledge, and ability to create and undertake vast, open canvases with a new wave planting style that awarded him the design proposal in 2000 for the Lurie Garden, the world’s largest rooftop garden located inside Millennium Park, Chicago, IL. Working hand and hand with Seattle landscape architecture firm, Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, Piet considers the two and a half acre garden to be his greatest garden to date. He considers his work to be ‘purposeful abandon’, with a very naturalistic feel and appearance, stating that his philosophy while designing the Lurie garden was to bring nature back into the city.

Some of Oudolf’s most influential works in the United States have included the perennial plantings at Battery Park, NY; The Highline perennial plantings, NY; and the Goldman Sachs headquarters, NY. Among the many awards he has received, Oudolf was also the recipient of the prestigious Prince Bernhard Culture Prize, an award given by the Queen of Holland to a person who has contributed something extraordinary to the culture of the county. Oudolf continues to design perennial gardens while also serving as a masterclass in the classroom at numerous prestigious schools around the world.

Oudolf also co-founded Future Plants, a company specialising in selecting, growing, breeding and protecting plants for landscaping and public areas. Oudolf`s recent projects include No. 5 Culture Chanel, Paris, France; The High Line, New York NY; Lurie Garden, Millennium Park, Chicago IL; Serpentine Gallery, London, England, and the Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy.

Oudolf is also a successful author, having co-written numerous books such as; “Planting: A New Perspective” (2013); “Landscapes in Landscapes” (2011); “Gardening with Grasses” (1998); “Designing with Plants and Planting Design” (1999); “Dream Plants for the Natural Garden” (2000); “Planting the Natural Garden” (2003), and “Planting Design: Gardens in Time and Space” (2005). In his 35-year career, Oudolf has achieved international acclaim, and has recently been awarded an Honorary Fellowship from RIBA for developing radical ideas in Planting Design (2012) and the Prince Bernhard Cultural Foundation Award (2013).

Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder  (Lawnton, PA, 1898 – New York, NY, 1976) utilized his innovative genius to profoundly change the course of modern art. Born into a family of celebrated, though more classically trained artists, Calder developed a new method of sculpting: by bending and twisting wire, he essentially "drew" three-dimensional figures in space. He is renowned for the invention of the mobile, whose suspended, abstract elements move and balance in changing harmony. Coined by Marcel Duchamp in 1931, the word mobile refers to both “motion” and “motive” in French. Some of the earliest mobiles moved by a system of motors, although these mechanics were virtually abandoned as Calder developed mobiles that responded to air currents, light, humidity, and human interaction. He also created stationary abstract works that Jean Arp dubbed stabiles.

From the 1950s onward, Calder turned his attention to international commissions and increasingly devoted himself to making outdoor sculpture on a grand scale from bolted steel plate. Some of these major commissions include: .125, for the New York Port Authority in John F. Kennedy Airport (1957); Spirale, for UNESCO in Paris (1958); Teodelapio, for the city of Spoleto, Italy (1962); Trois disques, for the Expo in Montreal (1967); El Sol Rojo, for the Olympic Games in Mexico City (1968); La Grande vitesse, which was the first public art work to be funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), for the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan (1969); and Flamingo, for the General Services Administration in Chicago (1973).

Major retrospectives of Calder's work during his lifetime were held at the George Walter Vincent Smith Gallery, Springfield, Massachusetts (1938); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1943–44); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1964–65); The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1964); Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris (1965); Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France (1969); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1976–77). Calder died in New York in 1976 at the age of seventy-eight.

 
JUNG METALOCUS 01

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