The 7000 Eichen of Joseph Beuys – experiences after twenty-five years
What roles for ruins? Meaning and narrative of industrial ruins in contemporary parks
Mughal gardens of the Indian Subcontinent and the colonial legacy: the treatment of Delhi’s Shalamar Bagh
Ruins, ideology and the Other in the landscape: the case of Zippori National Park, Israel
Under the Sky: The Sadabad Park project in Istanbul – balancing garden heritage conservation and contemporary park design
The 7000 Eichen of Joseph Beuys – experiences after twenty-five years Stefan Körner, Florian Bellin-Harder, Faculty of Architecture, City Planning, and Landscape Planning, University of Kassel, Germany
Abstract This article arose from a study made on the occasion of documenta 12 (2007), looking back after twenty-five years to the planning and subsequent maintenance of Joseph Beuys’s work of art 7000 Eichen (7,000 Oaks) in Kassel. Within the framework of Beuys’s understanding of action art and social sculpture, the care of the trees was understood to be an integral part of the planning of the piece. Observations on the trees’ current condition provide an opportunity to trace the history of the idea through to its consequences for the theory and practice of tree planting and maintenance. In this way, we see that the work of art reads less as a coeval entity; rather, the trees tell different stories of the project’s development with lost trees and new plantings, trees that have been neglected for twenty-five years contrastedwith
examples reflecting meticulous, age-appropriate arboriculturalmaintenance. Even during Beuys’s lifetime the 7000 Eichen campaign provoked a strongly polarized debate about urban vegetation. This article is a reflection on the relationship between art and nature, planning and politics, neighbourhoods and administration – not in an attempt to see which side was right or wrong, but rather to determine the condition of the piece today, and also which planting and maintenance techniques have proven to work and which have not.
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What roles for ruins? Meaning and narrative of industrial ruins in contemporary parks Elisabeth Clemence Chan, University of Oregon, Department of Landscape Architecture, USA
Abstract This article is concerned with the notion that parks containing industrial ruins possess an emotional attraction that can depoliticize historical narratives.
How can we design parks containing industrial ruins that reveal the multiplicities of history? In order to pursue this question, the article examines the literature to outline the relationships between the historical meanings of traditional ruins in landscape design and the contemporary emotional appeal of industrial ruins. The article also examines the relationship between cultural perceptions of industry, its ruins, and parks containing industrial ruins. The findings show that each of these three conditions (industry, industrial ruin, and park containing industrial ruins) are perceived differently, but all share the roles of icons, emotional objects, settings, workplaces, environmental agents and characters in cultural life. The article concludes with a guide for designers to assist in the creation of more complex narratives than are found in the contemporary genre of parks containing industrial ruins
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Mughal gardens of the Indian Subcontinent and the colonial legacy: the treatment of Delhi’s Shalamar Bagh Jyoti P. Sharma, Deenbandhu Chhotu Ram University of Science and Technology, Haryana, India
Abstract The treatment of historic Mughal gardens in India today largely continues to draw on the practices evolved by the British as their custodians in the ninteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper aims to illustrate how the British approach in the past and its espousal in contemporary practice have prevented Mughal gardens being interpreted and presented in their entirety as cultural assets. The paper examines the case of Delhi’s Shalamar Bagh in this context, tracing the garden’s reduction from a seventeenth-century Mughal leisure retreat to a fragmented and neglected ensemble of ruined garden structures in the colonial era. The perpetuation of the colonial approach by the garden’s current custodians has severed Shalamar Bagh’s relevance to contemporary times. A case is made for shunning the monument-centric approach of conservation adopted in the past and taking up the conservation of Delhi’s Shalamar Bagh as a spatial entity in its entirety, where both its architectural remains and the enveloping garden can provide an enriching experience to the users, supplanting the garden’s current perception as an open space disconnected from its urban environs.
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Ruins, ideology and the Other in the landscape: the case of Zippori National Park, Israel Shelley Egoz, Lincoln University, Canterbury, New Zealand, Racheli Merhav, Landscape Architect, Israel
Abstract Landscape is a potent ideological notion. As such, the discipline and profession of landscape architecture cannot avoid taking a political stance when addressing the public domain and design may become an ideological instrument. Often, landscape architects are socialized into state ideologies and fail to see how their work becomes an agent to reinforce political domination while marginalizing the Other. One prominent example of the power of ideology to conscript landscape to its cause is national parks.
In this paper we describe a specific case where the hegemony of a nationalist narrative is overwhelmingly pervasive: the ruins present in Israeli national parks. We present the case of Zippori National Park and discuss the ethical obligations of landscape architects to introduce currently hidden narratives into national parks to make them inclusive landscapes.
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Under the Sky: The Sadabad Park project in Istanbul – balancing garden heritage conservation and contemporary park design Hayriye Öztürk
Abstract In recent years I•stanbul Metropolitan Municipality has increased investment in public greenspace and stimulated municipal open space planning praxis. Numerous restorations, modernisation and new-build projects have brought a fresh dimension to the city’s greenspace policies, and improvement of public parks plays a spezial role in this, while respecting historical aspects.
This article describes and comments on I • stanbul Metropolitan Municipality’s Sadabad Park Project: a unique historic park landscape on the River Kag? ithane has been reinstated, revitalized and restored commensurate with its earlier importance as a recreational amenity. The Sadabad Park landscape, its design originally inspired by Western notions, is a striking reincarnation of historic Turkish garden culture. The project epitomizes the interplay of garden heritage conservation and contemporary park design, and demonstrates the creation of a park landscape that uses historical elements. Reinstatement of the Sadabad area is part of a complex urban development program whose conception as a local recreation and tourism area within the I • stanbul metropolitan region is, because of its heritage conservation approach, an exceptional feature of urban greenspace planning.
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