Robin Winogrond

Jury 2020 / Jury 2022 /

Robin Winogrond is a landscape architect and urban designer born and educated in the USA. She is co-founder of Zürich-based Studio Vulkan – winner of LILA 2019 Office Award. Besides her work in the office, she is teaching at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). Here is the interview we did with Robin Winogrond in 2019.

more by Robin Winogrond

The Park of Encounters is a complex design that deals with the public use of a once-army base. Built by the Nazi regime in 1937 and taken over by Allied forces after the war, Campbell Barracks later served as NATO HQ for Europe, which closed in the mid-2010s. Decades of army use left a palimpsest of traces that were waiting to be reinterpreted.

The jury recognises how difficult and yet successful it was to redesign this army-charged site with 'respectful lightness' and a 'slight twist of humour' as if the designers wanted to decompress the site and add play in a witty, nearly mischievous way. That is evident, for example, in a stripe of play elements that run through the entrance checkpoint, emphasising its disuse, or colouring and displacing the found artefacts from the 1970s. In a different configuration, stripped of their original use, these artefacts represent the retreat of control, repression and are abstracted into new constellations, provoking new interpretations and ways of interaction.

The jurors appreciated this underlying attitude, also resulting in elegant and much more subtle means of change, for example, mixing and shredding of the existing pavements and using them anew. The material/colour palette is exceptionally well thought-through; it communicates the different layers of the site's palimpsest and connects different parts into a coherent whole.

The Park of Encounters

The Fire Ring is an object in the landscape, seemingly simple yet a complex node of several design intentions. The simplicity of the circle is challenged by the playful displacement of the logs and by orientation. The elegance of the shape is contrasted by the rough treatment of the surface of the logs. Furthermore, there is an ambiguous relation between the Fire Ring having a public or private feel. In this regard, the jury appreciated the scale, being too large for groups to claim it for private use and too small to lose the sense of 'togetherness'. In terms of the overall attitude that shaped this object, and in the words of the designer, the Fire Ring transcends» one's own body, local culture and global lifestyles«. That makes the Fire Ring not only an object or a playscape but (also literally) a hotspot that captures and radiates multiple relevant notions and contextual particularities.

Fire Ring

The Voice of Memory

The project is a poetic response to a palimpsest of natural and human-driven processes that shaped the site. One physical corpus was made by two different forces. The narrative states that the general perception of the artificial hill and the surrounding forest is a natural environment. They call it pseudo-nature.
Abstractly, it works because of the contrast between open and closed spaces, namely, an artificial forest with a forest ring and a clearing. The top of the hill is a small circular viewing platform made of polished concrete which references the geological structure of the moraine below the top of the hill. The viewing disc features fog-jets that produce an artificial cloud which acts as a poetic reference to flying, to being in the sky, to touching the sky. Entering the artificial cloud acts as a reference to moving through clouds when travelling by plane.
Beside the forest ring, the remaining forest area appears almost untouched, as it is under a nature conservation plan. Hence, maintenance is used as means of design. The project exposes many contradictions in our understanding of what is natural and what is artificial. It also provides a series of poetic ambiences and playful experiences on the hilltop.

The Park, recreational area Butzenbüel at Zurich Airport

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