Innovative landscape architecture and garden design around the world

Nendo adds fun to the daily commute with a new Japanese station plaza

Possibly the best place in the world to be delayed for a train, the CoFuFun station plaza at Tenri Station in Japan, designed by Nendo, is an upbeat urban intervention and a new community hub for Tenri City in Nara prefecture. Designed like an over-sized crazy golf range, CoFuFun has a great sense of humour, yet also gets the job done. The 6000 sq m plaza features a series of white circular structures, that serve as multi-functional pavilions hosting a café, shops, information kiosk, bike rental, a play area, an outdoor stage and a meeting area. The orbiting concrete forms are also historically informed, referencing ancient Japanese burial structures ‘cofun,’ common to Nara which can be found dotted around the mountainous area surrounding the city.

Photography: Daici Ano

A landscaping project in Fuzhou by SWA responds to the site’s topography

This carefully designed landscape architecture project is the brainchild of American landscape firm SWA Group. Located in Fuzhou, China, the scheme includes a residential complex with leisure, retail and hospitality elements. The Yongtai project is a residential scheme idyllically situated within Fuzhou’s Red Cliff Scenic Area, bordering the Dazhang River in southeast China. Focusing on the landscaping aspect of this complex created for the Fuzhou Yongtai Youxin Real Estate, the project spans a large-scale, 45-hectare area, surrounded by twelve small hills. The area also features a strong water element, as it acts as a watershed for the region.

Photography: David Lloyd

Taylor Cullity Lethlean’s impressive National Arboretum in Canberra

Australian landscape architecture practice Taylor Cullity Lethlean’s park project in its home country, the National Arboretum in Canberra, was created in collaboration with Tonkin Zulaikha Greer Architects. A sprawling 250-hectare site of 100 single species forests and 100 gardens intertwined, the arboretum is a stunning solution to the need for tree diversity protection and offers facilities that invite human exploration. TCL’s projects oscillate in scale and are a careful balance of sustainability and aesthetics. Its work ranges from masterplans to residential projects and public gardens, such as the spectacular Australia Garden at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Cranbourne, designed in collaboration with Paul Thompson. ‘Our ancient land holds many stories, a number of which are rarely visited by Australia’s population due to the continent’s vast scale,’ says Simone Bliss, senior landscape architect at TCL. ‘We search for the site’s hidden narrative, abstract what we find and apply this process to the community’s needs.’

Photography: John Gollings

AGi Architects design a home for outdoor living in Kuwait

A family came to AGi Architects with the challenge of designing a house that would allow them to live outside 365 days a year, even in the midst of the Kuwaiti summer, when temperatures soar to over 40°C. Architects Joaquín Pérez-Goicoechea and Nasser Abulhasan – principals and founders of AGi – decided to use gardens to solve this request, weaving outdoor living into the fabric of the home while creating three spaces for different activities, times of the day and seasons. They examined the behaviour of the family to define the purposes of the outdoor spaces. The ‘wet garden’ with pool and fountain exists at the core of the house, to be used during the hot season and connecting all the social living spaces together; while the winter garden, a more relaxed and private space, sits up on the roof where a shaded terrace opens up views to the sea. The summer garden is 4m below street level, where a waterfall has a cooling effect, stimulating evapotranspiration to the upper levels of the house.

Photography: Fernando Guerra – FG+SG

Haamstede designed by Piet Oudolf

Amongst his larger-scale projects, including decorating The Battery in Manhattan and designing Hauser & Wirth’s rural Somerset farm gallery’s garden, Piet Oudolf also works with private residencies. A family holiday home in Haamstede, constructed by Piet Boon Studio and completed in 2008, features a garden typical of his signature use of perennial species at the rear of the property.

David Chipperfield creates a verdant village at the Xixi Wetland Estate

For two thousand years, Hangzhou has been celebrated for its incomparable tableau of unruffled lakes at the foot of green hills, and ancient waterways lined with gardens, temples, and graceful buildings designed by a succession of dynasties enamored with the landscape. All the more reason to applaud David Chipperfield Architects’ latest project in Hangzhou’s western outskirts for its sensitive regard for the city’s historical and botanical nuances. Almost a decade in the making, the Xixi (pronounced ‘see-see’) Wetland Estate is exactly as it sounds – a residential project that’s framed by the leafy, wild setting of Xixi, a bucolic national wetland park of droopy willow trees, long stretches of marshland, and aquatic causeways.

Photography: Simon Menges

An Athens promenading ground designed by New York-based landscape designer Deborah Nevins and Athens-based H Pangalou & Associates with Renzo Piano Building Workshop

Responding to the brief for a park that would host events and performances and be fully accessible to the disabled, RPBW worked closely with New York-based landscape designer Deborah Nevins and local practice H Pangalou & Associates, planning gridded gardens of local fauna and long connective pathways at the grounds of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre in Athens. Designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW), the SNFCC rises out of Athens’ suburban coastal landscape at Kallithea like a longstanding landmark. It erases memories of the vacant car park left over from the 2004 Summer Olympics, now a 32m-high artificial hill that might be as old as the Acropolis. It opens up the ‘beautiful view’, which the ancient port of Kallithea was originally named after, making you forget that it had once been obstructed by a busy highway. It is here, in this former void, that activity has since organically thrived at the core of a community in need of normality, space and nature.

Photography: Yiorgis Yerolymbos. Courtesy of SNFCC

A private garden by Piet Oudolf in the Netherlands

Piet Oudolf’s private garden nursery in Hummelo, a small village in the eastern Netherlands, is the spiritual and physical home of his experimentation with growing and combining plant selections. The garden, adjacent to his family home, has been the birthplace for qualities in his plant breeding that ‘vary from architectural value to [being] simply stronger or pest resistant’. The garden is awash in a dynamic palette, a wildflower meadow lover’s dream.

Philippe Prost’s elliptical memorial pays respect to WWI casualties

On the site of some of the bloodiest battles in northern France, a First World War memorial at Notre Dame de Lorette is known as colline sanglante or ‘bloody hill’. The area was razed so totally that it is hard to spot a building that predates the 1920s. The €8m international memorial is surrounded by cemeteries and obelisks commemorating the specific nations who fought in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region. But this new monument is different, aesthetically and symbolically. The Parisian architect Philippe Prost was tasked with designing a structure that would honour all the war dead. His low-rise elliptical structure cast in dark concrete features the names of 579,606 combatants who lost their lives. These names – collated over two years of research – are listed in alphabetical order, with no reference to nationality or rank. On the 2.2 hectare site, by France’s biggest military cemetery, Prost has created a ’Ring of Remembrance’, which he describes as ‘an expression of brotherhood and peace’.

Photography: Aitor Ortiz 

Green space at Royal Stoke Hospital designed by Colour

This garden project has had a wide-reaching effect for the improvement of daily life for staff and carers at Royal Stoke Hospital, as well as the faster recovery for patients. The scheme was inspired by evidence that patients follow a faster path of recovery with visual and physical access to green space. Nature continues inside with spaces for breaking out, contemplation and recreation.

Photography: Kristen Mccluskie