OLIN to create a city garden in Aberdeen
Landscape architects OLIN have won a competition to transform Aberdeen’s city centre into a garden and cultural and arts centre...
The winning concept ‘Granite Web’ is a collaboration between OLIN, architects Diller + Renfro and KeppieDesign. With 15-acres of space to transform, OLIN see the space as becoming the green heart of the city and a vital part of it’s rejuvenation.
OLIN partner Richard Newton said he was “truly honoured” to be a part of the team. He went on to describe the new space to be “accessible” and able to “seamlessly integrate the history of the city and provide unique opportunities for residents to engage and learn”.
One of the main features of the design is the connection of the landscape to the city through a web of paths. This path will guide visitors easily through the gardens, which will exhibit plants from across the world. The environment itself will imitate the landscape and ecology of north-eastern Scotlandm, while it is intended that buildings and landscapes work together to create microclimates that will act as a buffer to protect the garden and its visitors from any abrasive local weather.
The design incorporates a new landmark cultural and arts centre promoting the city’s most historic streets. According to Malcolm Reading Consultants, the group that managed the competition, retaining the “arches, vaults and bridge on Union Street” as well as “the balustrades and statues” are an important part of preserving Aberdeen’s legacy.
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What does not come across in this visualisation for those who do not know the city, is that this prime location site in the centre of Aberdeen is both difficult and dramatic with steep change of levels both internally and to each side. There is a wooded Victorian park to one side which contours down to an open ring road (& railway line) in a deep cut to the other side of the site that is both orally and visually intrusive. OLIN’s scheme provides an imaginative solution to all this by covering the road and matching up the different levels with its spider’s web of walkways.
There was a lively protest going on outside the exhibition hall when I visited which was mounted by the Friends of Union Terrace Gardens. They had their own scheme for the area and felt excluded by the Council from presenting it alongside the other competition entrants. It will be fascinating to see how this scheme develops over time and, once built, whether it gains wider local acceptance.