Panorama: Architecture in Germany

The “green-finger brigade” has changed in terms of what it does, its attitude and its self-confidence. A whole host of recently successful landscape gardeners is now increasingly working with architectural tools.

In the 1970s and 1980s, people generally considered that public parks and green spaces were the responsibility of the Office of Parks and Cemeteries, domestic gardens should be designed by an architect at the same time as the house itself, and that the Office for Water Resources Management should be responsible for riverbanks and meadows.


Of course, even back then there were famous garden architects like Hans Luz in Stuttgart, Peter Latz and Gottfried Hansjakob in Munich or Gustav Lange in Hamburg, who made a name for themselves with their parks and horticultural shows.

The profession of the landscape gardener has become better known thanks above all to the biennial Federal Horticultural Shows, which have been attracting large crowds since their inception in 1951, and which are not to be found in this form anywhere outside Germany. Of the Federal Horticultural Shows, it was particularly the shows which took place in Mannheim in 1955, in Stuttgart in 1977, at the Rheinaue in Bonn in 1979 and at the Fuldaaue in Kassel in 1981 that made a particular contribution to focusing the public’s attention on parks as an example of artistic design. Nowadays, additional State Horticultural Shows are organized by Germany's federal states, or Länder, giving local authorities the chance to smarten up problem areas and turn them into parks.

Wide range of applications

Only in the past two decades has it become standard practice to commission a specialist to design city squares and undeveloped areas close to large buildings or roads. Now that this has become the rule, the amount of work which has been generated for garden and landscape architects is unparalleled in Europe. In addition, there have been projects of previously undreamed-of dimensions – such as the renaturalization of brown coal mines, the redesign of areas previously used for military purposes, especially in the ex-GDR, the reorganization of former mining, industrial and railway sites, and measures implemented to protect against floods. Soon, the withdrawal of arable land in farming will provide a new source of work. It is not just the nature of the work itself that has changed, however – there has been a change in the attitude and self-confidence of the landscape planners, too. In the past, explains landscape architect Martin Rein-Cano from Berlin, his colleagues with their sociological background would design "areas of greenery for women and children" and then, when they all studied ecology in the 1970s, it was "areas of greenery for women, children and birds". Nowadays, it is above all the younger members of the profession who are cultivating a "new artificiality".

Architectural tools

Only few of the young landscape architects still follow the model set by the gently rolling hills of the Olympic Park in Munich, for example, or the calm and strictly ordered areas of greenery designed in the neo-classicist manner. Teams which have enjoyed recent success, such as the Berlin-based ST raum a. (Tobias Micke and Stefan Jäckel) with the garden they designed for the Federal Environmental Agency in Dessau or the Rathauspark in Hennigsdorf, Thomanek Duquesnoy Boemans with the Branitzer Platz or the Aerodynamic Park in Berlin, or Topotek1 (Martin Rein-Cano and Lorenz Dexler) with the 2004 State Horticultural Show in Wolfsburg, are increasingly working with architectural tools. Munich, Germany’s second most important centre of landscape architecture, is home to lohrer.hochrein, which planned for example the Phoenix West Park in Dortmund, and to realgrün (Wolf D. Auch and Klaus-D. Neumann), responsible for the design of the “Fort Malakoff” Rhine terraces in Mainz.

Graphic design of green areas

Admittedly, they do not go as far as the American Martha Schwartz – whose design for the Swiss Re insurance company in Munich in part did without plants altogether – when she arranges her geometrical beds made of glass, stone and plastic. "Non-organic" and hard, geometrical structures, fields of stone, street furniture made of steel or concrete, borders and embankments made of non-rust-proof Cor-Ten steel, or blue artificial waterways made of plastic, however, are the attributes of a largely graphic design of green areas which, in the world of architecture at least, no longer deals in romanticism and has virtually outlawed spontaneous and natural plant growth or biotopes.

In the new park landscapes, which are generally created in the context of horticultural shows and are therefore to be found at sites of some historical interest, the planners are keen to incorporate the heritage they find at the site into their work. Relics of bygone industrial use are prepared and made part of the thematic concept. For example, a steel works in Duisburg became a theme park (Emscher-Park), a former railway station in Halle/Saale with its points, buffers and signals intact became a commemorative garden (Thüringer Bahnhof), and a factory in Eberswalde was turned into a post-industrial history teaching park (State Horticultural Show 2002). A stationary crane serves as a viewing platform, train tracks remaining in the ground are a reminder of days gone by, with specially laid steel bands designed to awaken vague associations to them.

Emancipation of garden and landscape architects

The goal is to achieve the unusual, the surprising, the alienating material, the fractal form. All things sweet, romantic and floral – those, in short, which visitors would perhaps associate with a traditional garden – are taboo. Garden design has evolved away from the idyllic composition of tranquil plant arrangements to a modern – sometimes fashionable – and not always aesthetically pleasing artistic manifestation which no longer focuses on traditional presentation techniques. In this sense, the garden and landscape architects have largely emancipated themselves from the traditional architects.

Just like these architects, however, the garden and landscape planners analyse social and cultural issues, plan public spaces and do not regard living plants as being the sole “building material” in their environmental designs. Their self-confidence has grown accordingly; they publish books, show their works in gallery exhibitions, and are slowly developing a star system just like their colleagues in the building trade.

Overall, the standing of landscape architects has been underpinned by the fact that they have always upheld the “politically correct” attitudes that characterize today’s ecology debate. In addition, climate change has convinced people that cool parks and waterways must be made an integral part of the natural infrastructure of our urban centres. Landscape planning which extends all the way into the inner cities is a matter of making provision for the future and has become a higher priority than traffic and housing development planning.

Further reading Biennial books published by the Federation of German Landscape Architects: Neu verorten 2001; Event Landschaft? 2003; Spielräume 2005; Übergänge 2007; most recently: BDLA (Hg/Ed.): System Landschaft – Zeitgenössische deutsche Landschaftsarchitektur. Birkhäuser (Zurich 2009); ISBN 978-3-0346-0079-8 Kristin Feireiss (Hg.): Topotek 1 – Paradise Remix. Prestel (Munich Berlin London 2006); ISBN 978-3-7913-3698-5 Kristin Feireiss (Hg.): ST raum a. – passion city. Prestel (Munich Berlin London New York 2009); ISBN 978-3-7913-4305-1