Adriaan Geuze< (Speech at the Doors of Perception 3 Conference)

Table of Contents:
Summary
Introduction
Landscape Architecture and Nature
A Square
Islands

* * *
Summary
`Man-made' and `natural' have become highly ambiguous concepts. In attempting to achieve sustainable development, how should we structure our interventions in the environment? Adriaan Geuze of West 8 Architects states that, as a landscape architect, he suffers greatly from clichés that pretend falsely to embody fundamental opposites -- such as the City and Nature, Humankind and Ecology, or Technology and Nature. Geuze explains his approach to the environment, spatial planning and building by reference to two projects: a city square in Rotterdam, and the landscape design for the construction islands used to build the Oosterschelde barrier, the last in the series of immense `Delta works' designed to protect the southern part of the Netherlands from flooding. The re-design of the city square gives it a new surface using highly innovative materials, fights the hegemony of a cinema, and boldly links a parking garage, cinema and Rotterdam's skyline, turning the square into a `stage' designed to provoke human activity. In landscaping the islands, West 8 used waste materials (cockle and mussel shells) to create black and white surfaces, designed to be graced by the presence of colonies of black and white birds, attracted by the concealment the islands offer from predators. The black and white shells also create a beautiful visual pattern perceptible to drivers in cars moving rapidly through what was once the open estuary.

* * *
Introduction
I am a landscape architect. I suffer a lot within that discipline, because we are always occupied with fighting clichés that are supposed to represent some kind of opposition: humankind-nature, city-nature, humankind-ecology, technology-nature.

* * *
Landscape Architecture and Nature
Landscape architecture started as a discipline in the nineteenth century, motivated by two main things. The first is the romantic movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The new cities developing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially in Europe, were very bad environments for people. They had a bad social culture and physical structure. That is the reason for the sudden appearance of a kind of juxtaposition of City and Nature. City was bad and Nature was good. Landscape architects were asked to create nature. This romantic era completely changed the conception of nature.

Half of my work is based on telephone calls, for example, from the city. The city is extending and needs some green fingers, green lungs or green hearts; a client developing an office or industrial site needs some cover, some green for the purpose of concealment. And landscape architects are supposed to develop concepts for that.

I am Dutch, and thus was born in a country with a very special relationship with nature. This is the first map of lake Ijsselmeer and the creation of a new polder. You see some oil drums with fuel. They supply the diesel engines of this pump house, which is used to drain off the water and turn the area into a polder (an area of reclaimed land -- ed.) This is the way nature is created.

My grandfather was a dike engineer, so I was always quite familiar with this kind of thinking. I had a very bad time with my teachers at the university when it came to being taught what nature is. I was always suspicious of their ideas, which didn't correspond to my experience of nature.

I think it very strange that, for example, in industrial design, there is a kind of new symbioses between technology and ecology, while in urban planning these remain two completely separate worlds. Of course, nature should be brought into the city, but there is a right and wrong way to do it.

I will explain two projects. One is an urban project and one is a landscape project.

* * *
A Square

The first project is a square we designed in 1990, which is in construction at the moment. It is located in Rotterdam and called Schouwburgplein. It is the central square. This square is a beautiful void in the city. People complain about the square because it is really a void. They say that there is nothing on it; that it is windy and nobody ever goes there, and so forth. Which is not true, of course. There was a ten year strategy to develop the square in a more or less Italian way, to get the city try to make facades all around the square. And the second thing they wanted to do is to bring nature into the square, so they tried all kinds of things to make the square more green. But that is a problem, because the square is originally based on a parking garage. So there is only concrete beneath the concrete of the surface of the square and the double layer of parking garage can't use any trees. There were two strategies and they went wrong. Nothing happened. Every year, there was a new proposal. In 1990, we were asked to develop the next proposal -- the 31st proposal to date. I live in one of the apartments close to the square. In my earlier days in Rotterdam, I understood this square in a completely different way. I always thought of it as a kind of stage for people to act. I knew that Surinamese boys played football on it at night. During the daytime, all kinds of shoppers and office workers cross the square, eating potato chips and doing any number of other things. So the square has actually been discovered by a special audience.

But the most interesting thing is that at that moment, 1990, the city developed so many new office towers that this square became the first square in Holland with a skyline. The municipality did not know that. We thought that this was a very beautiful square, without facades and with a beautiful skyline. When you are in the middle of the square, you can really see all the towers in town. So we made a collage, based on God sending a beautiful empty square to this skylined city. We made a proposal in which the square was more or less a very simple surface of steel. And nothing happened.

Two years later we were asked to redevelop this design, because MGM cinemas wanted to build a cinema on top of this square -- the parking garage -- and this was the moment that there was enough money to develop the square. The most charming argument for us to do the square was that it was on top of the parking garage. The roof of the parking garage was constructed in the fifties -- terribly -- and the concrete was falling apart. The city wanted to repair this roof by making a new roof, and we anticipated them with a proposal to peel the top layers off of the roof and replace them with an ultra-light skin. This would give the square an ultra-light surface, something that can only be achieved in metal or wood. You would then no longer have to repair the roof, because it would last forever. This argument carries weight in the city.

That created the incredible opportunity to create a metal square, which I think still does not exist anywhere at the moment.We tested the surface and we brought in one of the municipality's cleaning machines. They put the machine on our dummy. The mayor was astounded that the machine did not fall through the new surface. This was really the best argument in support of our proposals.

Then we had to fight the cinema complex. The cinema was extending every week and towards the end, the cinema complex with its approximately 2500 seats, now under construction, is really a great big thing on that square. It is devouring the public space, but also offering a shadow. We fought the cinema. We changed the shape a little and the entrance created a kind of zoning, in which the Eastern part of the square, which is always in sunshine, has the benches, and the shadowy part, which is quite unusable, in between, is more or less intended for activities.

This is the final scheme we developed, in which you can see and enjoy the mosaic structure of the square. You can see that we wanted to create a space which is completely flat and a void which is a playground for the people -- a stage. A space which does not give any function to the square, but provokes activity. And this mosaic is done in wood, rubber, granite, metal and epoxy.

The first part is the boardwalk of wood and secondhand, black rubber. This strip contains a seventy-metre-long bench, a massive, stainless steel structure with a wood cover. We hope that the wood will be scratched up with a lot of love messages and other things.

This strip also contains six of the garage's ventilation pipes. We covered them with a kind of steel structure,with transparent fences and we elevated them 15 metres above square level. The square is about half a metre higher than the street.

There is a clock. And recently we changed the shape of these three elements into a kind of Picasso heads. The middle part of the square is done in metal, with all different sorts of planks and perforation. Here you see the effect at night, caused by the illumination underneath. When you walk across this square you change: from zebra patterned into a panther or silhouette. Those things happen because of the illumination.The epoxy part is the shadowy part. It is in blue green concrete, covered with epoxy, with silver leaves, making a kind of eternal fall.

This is the playground. Here you see a section of the square, with the parking garage underneath and the huge cinema. Seeing this, you understand why we lifted those ventilation pipes and made those three boxes.

To provoke the cinema and to keep a grip on the space on top of the parking garage, so that it will not be pushed to the East, we created four hydraulic lamps.

They are thirty-five metres high. These huge dinosaurs have lamps no bigger than a fist. Those walnut brains are carried by an enormous, steel, hydraulic body with feet as big as a Mercedes Benz. These four lamps change their shape every two hours. There is also a machine for the public, into which they can put a coin, choose a lamp and manipulate the arm. So if you have a lover on the square, you can spotlight them. The lamps are really aggressive and you might say that they are creating the square. I think they are generating its character.

There is another zone done in granite, also in strips, for children. It contains a hundred and twenty fountains that only turn on when the temperature is above 22 degrees centigrade. There is a spring, creating a kind of connection in between the cinema, the theatre and the other buildings in the square. Underneath the surface, we add a high-pressure pipeline bubbling the water and making a kind of champagne noise. So we expect somehow that the atmosphere is more or less interactive, changing by temperature, by illumination, by day and night, or summer and winter, while on the other hand it is a really empty place. It is really free.

This is a computer-generated image of what will happen. In the daytime, you need sunglasses on the boardwalk and at night, you have the reflection of all the commercial signs of the city. This is the view from my balcony in the future -- next year.

* * *
Islands
The second project is linked to the heart of my grandfather. The Southern part of Holland, Zeeland was an archipelago, and in 1953 there was a storm disaster. Almost 2000 people were drowned and the Dutch created the mighty Delta works, which changed Zeeland into a kind of lake district. This could only be done by blocking the estuary with dikes and dams. The last dam to be realised in the seventies was the Oosterscheldedam. There was a great deal of environmental and ecological discussion. Nobody wanted to have this estuary blocked by a dam, because the tides in the area would change dramatically and the mussel industry would be demolished. Therefore, they invented this enormous storm barrier with doors or locks which can be locked in stormy weather in February. To create this, the engineers first created islands in the sea and from those construction islands they built the barrier. Nevertheless, there was not enough money to clean up the construction islands.On the left, you see a picture of what was meant to be the final result, a very elegant engineering structure in the middle of the sea. At the right, you see the real situation now, with the construction docks still there.

The problem is that when you are on those islands and also on the dam, you can hardly see the sea. That is strange, because the dam was meant to further environmental quality. You can't see any seals, but they are there. In 1989, we were asked to change parts of those construction islands, especially the sand depots, into artificial dunescapes. Here, again, when something is not good, we see that the landscape architects are asked to give it back to nature -- to change it into nature of a good quality. The client asked us to turn it into an artificial dunescape and to plant it with all kinds of dune grasses and so forth. For me this was really dramatic, because it meant that people would not watch the water and the whole ecosystem. Rather, a very strange man-made phenomenon would be made. Dune landscapes are also found in nature, but in different spots -- not in the middle of the seas. We said that it could not be done and proposed to make enormous, flat plateaus out of those sand depots.

This is a model. Here we see a highway coming out of the polder, four metres below sea level, rising at a nice angle to the level of the dam, which is 25 metres above the sea level. In Holland, this is dramatically high -- 30 metres!

We created an enormous plateau. The idea was that when you drive there, you are `launched' by your momentum and then, suddenly, on a 10-metre level, you watch this incredible panorama of the sea and understand what is happening: you are going through the Oosterschelde, the estuary. Of course, the client did not understand that, but we had a more intelligent proposal.

We said: let's cover all these plateaus with shells. Shell is a waste material which can be obtained at no cost in these areas from the shell-producing industries. Moreover, we insisted on two types of shells: mussels and cockles, which are blue and white.

We know that when you cover such a plateau -- a flatland covered with shells -- a bird colony will appear immediately. That was our bright idea beforehand, but it is tested and proven now. Black birds really prefer black surfaces, because they cannot be seen by predators. As white birds prefer white surfaces, you understand that we used those two colours to make a sort of living Zen garden out of these birds. When you shape and play with the pattern of black and white in a garden, you play with the species of birds as well.

For me, this was a really convincing argument. It is a sort of Darwinism: human beings and animals are somehow expected to assimilate to nature. But Darwin pointed out that they change. When nature changes, animals and human beings change. So it is a kind of statement that nature assimilates to human beings. That was a really charming point for me.

Here, you see how we played with the shell pattern in relation to the car speed. You have to understand that those areas can only be seen by cars. You don't go biking there. It is too big. This is why the perception of a driver is really important.

When driving over or through those plateaus, you are facing a rhythm of black and white shells and black and white birds. There have been a few proposals: the first one was executed and the next two will be executed in the coming years. The first one was an experiment. Here we see the plateau covered with black shells, mussels, and with machines. Then come the white shells and this was the final result.

This is really Dutch -- all the ditches with frocks of lines or reeds, and then you have the cows, which are the Dutch antelopes, also in lines. Our landscape is ordered like that. I think ecology and human beings really interact in a very intelligent way. Here, we see what happens when you drive there.This is at approximately the speed of a car. And the most beautiful thing happens at night.

The shells gleam and shine, illuminated soley by the traffic. The night there is really black. Only cars bring light.

In my view, this project is a beautiful example of relation of technology -- the citizen speeding along in a car -- with the ecology of the Delta.