First, here’s the news that Michael van Gessel, the Dutch landscape architect, took his time and a fair bit of teasing indirection to get out last Friday night in Barcelona: The winner of the 2014 Rosa Barba International Landscape Prize is the North Wharf Promenade and Silo Park on the waterfront of Auckland, New Zealand. It was designed by Taylor Cullity Lethlean of Melbourne with Wraight + Associates of Wellington and completed in 2011.
The big announcement came late in the day, near 9:00 p.m. Van Gessel, who served as the president of the six-person Rosa Barba prize jury, sat with his feet propped casually atop a chair on a stage of the astonishing Palau de la Música Catalana—though in the handsome contemporary auditorium belowground, not the 1908 modernista marvel upstairs, designed by Lluis Domènech i Montaner, which at that hour was filling for a dance performance of the Gran Gala Flamenco. In front of van Gessel were several hundred people gathered for the prize announcement as part of the 8th International Biennial of Landscape Architecture, which ran from September 25 to 27. The audience included the designers of the 11 finalist projects for the prize; they each had presented their entry the previous day. There was also a large turnout of landscape architects, academics, and students from Europe and elsewhere.
Before announcing the winner, van Gessel took the opportunity to handicap, at times pointedly, six of the 11 finalists the jury considered most closely. Turenscape’s Qunli Stormwater Park in China showed “a holistic approach to solve flood problems in cities,” but with broad avenues all around it, the place looked inaccessible. “What the jury wonders about is how people get there,” van Gessel said. “The designer does not give a clue.” The vast restoration by Batlle i Roig Arquitectes of the Vall d’en Joan landfill near Barcelona, which was basically a glacier of garbage, is a “beautiful and convincing project” with its agricultural terraces and switchback paths, but the jury was not taken by gabion walls built from landfill waste “in a very designed manner,” which make the project “parkish, instead of landscape.” The jury also deprecated the High Line in New York, by James Corner Field Operations, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and Piet Oudolf, the final segment of which had opened the previous weekend. “It is simple, strong, and it works,” van Gessel said. But “the original idea of a promenade close to that of the existing romantic, derelict, and overgrown railroad track has been weakened by the introduction of an ‘episodic journey’ with amphitheaters, pine tree groves in planters, water features, raised meadows, etc.”
Of the winning North Wharf project, he noted that parts of the project are “overdesigned, somewhat perfumed, and unnecessary in this conceptually strong urban strategy.” But van Gessel said the jury was impressed by how the project improved on a developer-driven master plan that was the starting point for the rather rough 1.8-hectare industrial site. “To convince politicians not to demolish derelict industrial artifacts is one thing,” van Gessel said. “But to convince them also to keep the fish trawlers and other uses in place instead of pushing them elsewhere for the benefit of hard-core real estate development and a touristic waterfront is something else. That would have taken away the very life out of the harbor.”
“It’s about friction,” Perry Lethlean, the principal designer, had said of the project in his presentation: There may be swarms of vacationers, but then a big truck might come through to haul things off the water. Lethlean seemed genuinely dazed by having won. He went up to the stage wearing a faded gray T-shirt and looked as if he might have just come from cleaning the garage. He thanked his “very brave” client, Auckland Waterfront, “who was willing to change and see the waterfront still had use” as a working port.
This year was the eighth round of the biennial Rosa Barba Prize, which comes with 15,000 euros attached. It is now considered the biggest prize for landscape architecture in Europe, though this round was a first in that the sponsors offered the competition up to any project around the globe. They were then obliged by 427 entries. The prize is named for Rosa Barba Casanovas (1948–2000), who was an architect, urbanist, planner, and founder of the landscape architecture degree program at the Barcelona School of Architecture. On the occasion of the prize’s turning global, her husband, the urbanism professor Ricard Pié Ninot of the School of Architecture of the Vallès at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, was invited to serve on the jury, along with Sue Anne Ware, Desiree Martínez, Manel Colominas, and Martí Franch Batllori, whose firm, EMF Landscape Architecture, won the 2012 Rosa Barba Prize for the restoration of a former Club Med resort site on the coast of northern Catalonia at Cap de Creus.
Another finalist for the 2014 prize received the Public Opinion Prize, decided by attendees of the biennial: the Termas Geometricas, a spellbinding system of hot springs deep in a canyon in Villarrica National Park in Chile, designed by Germán del Sol Architects. The project’s red-painted wood boardwalks, small outbuildings with grass roofs, and the stone-terraced pools look distinctly handmade, nestled amid fern-carpeted walls of rock with clouds of steam floating constantly upward. “It is a very spiritual place,” van Gessel said. “It is not a new assignment, but an exceptional one.”
Near the biennial site, at the Institute of Architects of Catalonia, an exhibition of the Rosa Barba Prize finalists opened the first evening, as did a juried exhibition of work by 27 university programs in landscape architecture. The top award among the schools went to the University of Toronto, with special mentions given to the University of Roma Tre for collaboration, Victoria University of Wellington for heritage, and the Oslo School of Architecture & Design for landscape-oriented urbanism.
Credits: Photography by Simon Devitt; Silo Park, Jonney Davis; marine revetment, Jon Baxter; view down to the weekend Silo market, Bas van Est.
Fantastic to see unique waterfront architecture be recognized as a success– many risks were taken in constructing this wharf. Great news.