topoScape

The jury recognises a sensible uncovering of the palimpsest and handling the ‘objects trouves’ from various layers of time. Specifically, the jury appreciated the use of waste and rubble found on site and the different creative transformations into very distinct and unconventional landscape features that spark thoughts and reflection, such as the retaining walls or the objects found in the paths and lapidarium. The rubble was used as an aggregate for the concrete, perhaps abstracting the strata and suggesting that an essential layer of history is buried underneath. The jury appreciates that even with the park’s most monumental features, the designers introduced a sense of playfulness and dynamism that eases the heaviness this memorial could otherwise embody.

Besides the site’s sensitive historical aspects, the designers established new access to park spaces for as wide a group of visitors as possible. Natural processes are invited to develop in the park, rendering the rubble mound a ruin taken over by life, establishing itself as Fourth Nature. It invites multi-species populations into the same space, a public space that, by definition, is a shared space.
The jury found the park’s design to be a coherent and well-set attitude that can elegantly overcome intricate complexities of memory. This approach enhances a landscape project as a living memory of several temporalities, anthropic, mineral and plant, without one overhanging the other in a context still relevant today.