Book - Miniature and Panorama: Vogt Landscape Architects, Projects 2000-06
- Published: 11 October 2007 15:34
- Last Updated: 11 October 2007 15:34
- Reader Responses
BOOK
By Richard Weston
Miniature and Panorama: Vogt Landscape Architects, Projects 2000-06.
By Günther Vogt et al.
Lars Müller Publishers, 2006. 576pp. £39.90
This thick wedge of a book on the Swiss landscape architect Günther Vogt is filled with colour and a clamour of texts and images. Presumably the aim is to offer an allusive, multifaceted view of his work and ideas, and the result feels more like a website than a traditional book.
Vogt was the partner of the celebrated, prodigiously productive Dieter Kienast, who died young in 1998. Kienast’s monographs were famously restrained, with a let-the-work-speak-for-itself combination of elegant drawings and large black-and-white photographs, accompanied by matter-of-fact descriptions.
In their place we get a bewildering array of material by ‘artist friends’ and by Vogt himself – numerous short texts and photographic essays as well as project documentation. The linking theme is our relationship with nature, with Vogt’s schemes occupying only half of the 576 pages.
While there is much of interest, I found this medium-is-the-message presentation slightly annoying.
Among the artists’ contributions, Hamish Fulton’s ‘paper walks’ and Olafur Eliasson’s photographs of Vogt’s rainforest at Zurich zoo seem to me a waste of space. Christian Vogt offers some pleasant photographic ‘miniatures and panoramas’ of the projects, while Olaf Unverzart’s pictorial essay, entitled ‘The Production of Plants’, contains several memorable images, including the bizarre sight of an auditorium-like auction room in which racks of plants are mechanically paraded before hundreds of buyers.
The longest text, Peter Erni’s ‘Nowhere and Everywhere’ – an exploration of the garden as an emblem of our ‘ceaseless quest for paradise’ – does not seem to me quite so original or profound as its arch style would like us to think: much of the text is italicised, and comes replete with marginal elaborations in small type that are often of marginal relevance.
By far the most interesting things in the book are Vogt’s contributions, making the noise all the more annoying. His short texts are thoughtful meditations on the nature of nature, at their best when dealing with the implications of the specific, like the camouflage patterns of the peppered moth or what constitutes a terroir.
His visual essays – which range from catalogues of Swiss clouds and soil profiles to the cartography of mountains and the stunning ‘relief maps’ of Edouard Imhof – are also more engaging than the contributions of the artists, who’ve been drafted in to add cultural weight.
And so to the work itself. This ranges in scale from a vast new residential district in China to more discreet pieces like the sculptured terrain around Herzog & de Meuron’s Laban Centre in London or the wobbly planters in Foster + Partners’ Gherkin.
The formal assurance and clarity we came to expect from Kienast Vogt is still there, and, if a shift in direction can be detected, it is towards a greater interest in the botanical/horticultural possibilities of landscape design, and in natural processes as sources of inspiration. Among the latter I particularly liked the courtyard of Zurich’s Park Hyatt hotel, where a Karst landscape was abstracted into slightly convex and concave slabs calculated to dry differentially.
Vogt’s planting schemes – beautifully notated graphically – range from austerely minimal monocultures of birch trees to lavish tapestries of colour.
A corporate headquarters in Saint Gall teems with almost 200 perennials, orchestrated according to a complex score based on flowering times and colours, while at the home of FIFA in Zurich the world’s major vegetation zones are evoked including, in the courtyard at the building’s heart, a richly planted recreation of a clearing in a North American cloud forest.
Having dwelt on the book’s perversities, I must end by saying that it is beautifully presented and that most of its varied pages can be dipped into with pleasure. Vogt is clearly a major talent in his own right and, on the evidence presented here, well on the way to establishing a distinctive position in European landscape architecture. It will be fascinating to see how his work develops, and when he next presents it in book form I hope that he will do so more discursively, in a format that gives the projects the breathing space they deserve.
Richard Weston is a professor at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University
