Gianluca Torini

2007 – 2011 studied landscape architecture at the Technical University of Berlin. 2010 internship at bbzl and A24 Landschaft. Bachelor of Science degree in 2011, then employment at Weidinger landscape architects. From 2012 freelance work at Weidinger Landschaftsarchitekten, GM013, Lavaland and Treibhaus Landschaftsarchitektur, Hamburg and Berlin. Since 2013 studying for a master’s degree in landscape architecture at the Technical University of Berlin. 2016 Foundation of the SOWATORINI Landschaft office.

Sebastian Sowa

After training as a landscape gardener (German young gardener master 2005) and working as a traveling journeyman at the Bruns tree nursery, studied landscape architecture at the Technical University of Berlin and the Technical University of Munich. Bachelor of science degree in 2012. Afterwards employment at Studio Vulkan in Zurich and at Plantago Gartenkultur in Basel and freelance work at Treibhaus Landschaftsarchitektur in Hamburg. From 2015 – 2018 art studies at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen with a focus on land-art with Prof. Schreckenberger and Thilo Folkerts. (Master of arts) 2016 Foundation of the SOWATORINI Landscape office. Since 2014 lecturer (Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst, Basel, Muthesisus Kunsthochschule, Kiel) Since 2019 research assistant at the Department of Landscape Architecture I Design at the University of Kassel, Prof. Röntz

SOWATORINI landscape: Ultimately, the decision of two friends to take the landscape and life into their own hands. By the time we got to this point, we had worked our way into the open space for a number of years through ideas competitions and art projects. The (learned) attitude: The small size of our office offers the opportunity to do a lot, to experiment a lot. We are constantly working on the landscape anew. We work in temporary formats at the interface to art, in private gardens and in public spaces; across all typologies and scales. What sets us apart is the willingness to search and to take the time for it. To be surprised and not to rely on creative reflexes and experience. The sentence that Prof. Cordula Loidl-Reisch gave us in one of the first hours of our studies still applies: “And you too are called upon to discover the new!”

Selection of prices and awards

2012 Special prize landscape architecture,

“Memories through the Mark Brandenburg”, Potsdam

Schinkel competition of the AIV Berlin

2012 3rd place in the BDLA realization competition

“Garden of the Future”, Zülpich

2014 1st place in the art competition and 1st audience award

Heiligenhafen installation course

Installation “passage”, realization summer 2014

2015 shared 1st prize, ideas competition “Future images of a green city”

Federal Institute for Building, Urban and Spatial Research

2017 2nd place, ideas competition, playground meeting point

Baufi24 Award

2018 2nd place, Malecon ideas competition, Havana, Eleven magazine (GB)

2019 Architect-in-residence, Project “The Myth of the Harbor – A Sketchbook in 3 Series”, Goethe Institute Rotterdam

2019 Winner of the International Garden Festival Reford Gardens, Canada

The colors of métis together with the natural color NGO seven gardens e.V.

2020 1st place in the Rurberg lakeshore implementation competition

Municipality of Simmerth, Rursee

2021 Prize winners garden field and sea,

Publication Gardens of the Year, Callwey Verlag

Colors of Metis

Public Landscape Project, Art Installation / with: Isabella Smolin / Location: International Garden Festival Reford Gardens, Canada / Design year: 2018 / Year Built: 2019

The playground is a canvas. The colours are extracted from soils, leaves and fruits collected in the vicinity of the Reford Gardens. Visitors become artists and painters for the day by first putting sponges under their shoes, provided around the frame. After soaking the sponges with water, painters must walk through the reservoirs adjacent to the canvas to choose their colours. They step on the canvas and join in with the others on a large landscape painting. On warm days, they also can walk barefoot through the colours and leave marks with their feet on the canvas. At the end of the Festival, the entire painting is split up and visitors can take parts of it home with them. This painting playground project incorporates the garden, art and intuitive play. The colours, whose raw materials are extracted locally, give the project a depth that goes beyond the beauty of the result, and defines beauty as an important condition of the design process.

Brettspiel (Board Game)

Public Landscape Project, Schools and Playgrounds / Project location: Husemannplatz, 44787 Bochum, Germany / Design year: 2019/ 2020 / Year Built: 2020

STARTING POSITION

One of the largest and most important inner-city squares in Bochum, Husemannplatz, will be completely redesigned in the coming years. The city of Bochum saw the last phase before the renovation as an opportunity to try out the inner city as an open space and, specifically, to make playing in the city center tangible with unusual ideas.

CONCEPT

The starting point of the board game is to break the rigid symmetry of the square. About 90 boards lay across the square like a network of narrow webs. The boards run horizontally, dip one below the other, are inclined or have gaps that have to be overcome.

A place that is not a playground for us, but a temporary, sculptural (play) landscape that is open to everyone. And a work that makes the temporary and experimental character visible in its appearance.
REVIEW

Juliane von Hagen writes about the “dynamic hustle and bustle on the simple but convincing Mikado made of wooden walkways” in Garten + Landschaft: “The installation encourages young people in particular to climb, balance and jump. They develop games with their own rules that guide their movements on the board sculpture. (…) At peak times, dozens of children are playing by their own rules at work at the same time. Course athletes have established the landscape as a permanent training location. Young people with stunt scooters jump over the installation. Still others just make themselves comfortable on the boards and platforms.

Durchgang (Passage)

Art Installation, Art Festival Heiligenhafen, Germany / Design year: 2013 / Year Built: 2014

Water, wind, sun and sand. How valuable is the seemingly infinite? The art installation Durchgang wants to show what happens when these elements gradually diminish until they almost completely disappear in the last few meters of the corridor. Then a door opens and the view goes back towards the sea, you can feel the wind and the sand shine brightly.

Feld und Meer (Field and sea)

Private garden, support plant planning: Anja Maubach, Staudengärtnerei Arends, Wuppertal / Project location: Bochum, North-Rhine-Westphalia, Germany / Design year: 2017 / Year Built: 2018

Idea

A modern, cubic building. the ground floor is completely open to the garden over 9m wide. We wanted a garden that was the other world. A different kind of experience and sensuality that makes the seasons readable over the year.

Concept

The garden is in an underground car park. We wanted to work with perennials and grasses that develop a strong vegetative dynamic throughout the year. This gradual movement over the year should be visible. We have therefore placed a rigid field of concrete steles at the side of the natural appearance and dynamism. The steles will rise in height towards the rear. Over the course of the year, the front steles initially disappear, until in autumn, the vegetation makes the steles almost completely invisible. The tops of the steles are inclined at the angle at which the field rises backward. A small but noticeable detail.

This other world is entered by crossing a threshold. A row of block steps marks the threshold (and at the same time ensures a little more substrate build-up). Then you walk on narrow boardwalks into the garden. You walk carefully, the boards give way and you can feel physically: Different laws apply here.

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