Barcelona gardens that aren’t gaudy or Gaudi…
Botanical Gardens of Barcelona
The Botanical Gardens of Barcelona have all the ingredients to be one of the most exciting gardens of this century. Situated at the top of Montjuic overlooking the city, and next door to the Olympic stadium, it has a Mediterranean climate that ensures plants from Australia, Chile, California and South Africa feel right at home. The council appear to have given complete artistic control over to a team of five multi-disciplinarians, including the late great Catalan landscape architect Bet Figueras, to push the boundaries of garden design, as the city has done with architects for over a century.
But it’s not.
If a botanical garden is about the plants first it definitely fails. In their defence few plants have matured enough in the 13 years since it opened to become characters in their own right. But till then the density, the spacing and playful interaction between the plants feels unconsidered. You’re not inspired to search for the plant labels, even if you could get near them.
And if pushing boundaries often refers to hard landscaping elements then it falls short too. European garden traditions are replaced with jagged, variable angles with multiple path choices, but none with enough tension to lure you to them. A positive feature is that Corten steel is used as retaining walls, which are completely fitting given that the colour of Catalan soil can be the colour of rust. Sadly, the same train of thought didn’t apply to the path material. Poured concrete has never looked like such a wasteful resource- it’s scary to think how much was actually used. This, the most dominant feature in the whole garden, needed a secondary sensorial quality to ensure that the zig-zags shapes weren’t just about being different for the sake of it.
The style and the failure reminds me of Daniel Lieberskind’s Jewish Museum of the same era in Berlin, where the architect was given license to make his architecture the destination for the tourists at the expense of the sensitive Holocaust artefacts.
It’s wonderful that the council have been so brave to trust the design team with such a radical brief. But sadly for them and us it suggests that there may have been a power struggle amongst the five multi-disciplinarians, and it wasn’t the horticulturist that came out on top.
Mies Van der Rohe’s German Pavilion
Situated a few minutes walk down from the botanical gardens, at the bottom of Montjuic, is a seminal piece of Bauhaus architecture. Experienced first hand, Mies Van der Rohe’s German Pavilion, built for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition, justifies the hype that precedes it. Its pioneering style is put into perspective by the nostalgic kitsch of a Catalan palace that directly overlooks it – it’s difficult to believe but they were actually built for the same exposition. It’s tempting to read both of them in the context of the history of both nations when they were created.
In contrast to the Botanical Gardens, the pavilion is a lesson in shaping space and considerate materials. Whilst the little planting is minimal and treated as a surface, as is the water, the wavy geological forms captured in the stone panels evoke a living, shifting planet that fills the structure with energy and awe.
The majority of the pavilion, is open space, with fluid movement flowing through inside and out, with butterflied panels of travertine, green marble and onyx shaping a few moments of tension that tease you round corners.
The influence of this ‘less-is-more’ approach on certain garden designers is obvious, and Christopher Bradley-Hole certainly comes to mind, who has not hid his admiration for the German Pavilion. In theory, it should be simple to recreate the impact that the pavilion has, but so few have managed to understand the commitment to an ideal that is needed. And probably just as well, as this is an 80 year old garden, and so to mimic this style does not make a modern garden, but a modernist style garden. The outdoor room gardens that have been fashionable and aspirational in the last 20 years that ape this modernist style are usually described as contemporary gardens by their designers or publishers. A better term I feel is what garden writer Darryl Moore prefers to call it – ‘Comfortable Modernism’.
