status:
International Urban Design Competition
year:
2012
place:
Berlin, Germany
client:
Municipality of Berlin
with:
baukuh, Kuehn Malvezzi Architects, Gyler Myditi
area:
25.000 m²
description:
We propose to surround the Forum with Italian gardens extending all over the competition site. The Italian gardens provide the entire area with a common tone, not alien to the historical one and yet entirely contemporary. The Italian gardens produce a multiple open space, composed of five groups of open-air green rooms defined by hedges of different species (both deciduous and evergreen) from all over the world. The green rooms have a low metropolitan intensity. By filling the majority of the surface with more intimate, low-intensity or specialized functions such as restaurants, sport fields or archaeological areas, the – potentially excessive – amount of “public” open space is reduced to a reasonable figure, producing three “squares” in front of the northern, western and southern gates of the Forum. The Italian gardens surrounding the Forum are composed of five main areas. These areas are understood as open air museum spaces, collecting plants from all continents. Each area corresponds to a part of the world, exposing to the city – in the most direct and innocentway – the complexity of the collections of the Forum.
