Ireland / Absorption into the Landscape

Referencing architect Sarah Lappin, a common practice for many designers in Ireland is an absorption of the landscape, both with built and unbuilt work. Lavished as the country with ‘a million shades of green’, much has been written about the beauty of Ireland, and an effort to re-create ‘civilized’ work from centuries of European artists, musicians, and poets will not be attempted here. Instead, the people of this island nation - historically battered economically and politically for centuries - find guidance and an untroubled expression in their natural surroundings. But, to understand the Irish landscape is to comprehend a battered coastline of cliffs, rolling farmland, bleak hillsides of fissured limestone pavement, vast peat bog lands and the northern light that continuously affect a reading of them. The commonality that threads all these juxtaposed conditions is a landscape that is permeated by water, whether through its proximity to the coastline or to lakes, rivers, bogs and marshlands, and it is the way that precipitation moves through and over the ground that determines the visual form of the environment.

Limestone perimeter wall around farmland

Norwegian Ambiguity / Architecture & Landscape

Sverre Fehn's Ivar Aasen Center in Ørsta

“Norwegian architecture can be connected to a particular relationship between building and landscape that can be described by the ambiguity between resistance and interplay. Both the larger landscape and the individual site can put up a fierce resistance to cultivation and construction. At the same time, terrain and vegetation offer rich possibilities for adding qualities to human building. Some woud say that this ambiguity, given by the meeting between man and landscape, is a given general expression in the Norwegian culture.”

— Ola Bettum, Landscape Architect

Village of Undredal along the Aurlandsfjord

Village of Gudvangen located at the end of the Nærøyfjord

The Holmenkollbakken ski jump in the Holmenkollen neighborhood of Oslo

The village of Flåm at the inner end of the Aurlandsfjord

Steven Holl's Knut Hamsun Center in Hamarøy

The Serpentine Pavilion / Peter Zumthor

The 2011 Serpentine Gallery`s Pavilion in Hyde Park is the 11th installment in the Gallery's annual summer series, seen as one of the world's most ambitious architectural programs of its kind, even with some concern, as it relies on established architects/designers as an invitation-only commission. The Serpentine's Pavilion, conceived in 2000 by Gallery Director Julia Peyton-Jones, is sited on the Gallery's lawn for three months and the immediacy of the commission - a maximum of six months from invitation to completion - provides a unique model worldwide. This years installation was designed by Pritzker Prize award-winning Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, which will be the architect's first completed building in the UK and includes a specially created garden by the influential Dutch designer Piet Oudolf (High Line, Millennium Park, among others). Zumthor's Serpentine Pavilion will operate as a public space and as a venue for Park Nights, the Gallery's program of public talks and events. Park Nights will culminate in the annual Serpentine Gallery Marathon in October.

The concept of this year's pavilion is the Hortus Conclusus, a Latin term literally meaning 'enclosed garden', or as Zumthor puts it, "a contemplative room, a garden within a garden". The building's design acts as a stage, a backdrop for the interior garden of flowers and light. Through blackness and shadow one enters the building from the lawn and begins the transition into the central garden, a place abstracted from the world of noise, traffic and smells of London.

With this Pavilion, as with previous structures such as the famous Thermal Baths (Vals, Switzerland) or the Bruder Klaus Chapel (Mechernich, Germany), Zumthor has emphasised the role the senses and emotions play in the architectural experience, from the precise yet simple composition and presence of the materials, to the handling of scale and the effect of light, creating contemplative spaces that evoke a spiritual dimension of our physical environment. The construction is made of a lightweight timber frame wrapped with scrim and coated with Idenden. Exterior and interior walls have staggered doorways that offer multiple paths for visitors to follow, gently guiding them to a central inner garden, the heart and focus of the intervention. The covered walkways and seating surrounding this central space create a serene, contemplative environment from which visitors look onto the richly planted sunlit garden with a patch of sky gloriously framed like a giant oil painting above your head.

In creating the central garden, Piet Oudolf emphasized the natural architecture of plants, using expressive drifts of grasses and herbaceous perennials to create gardens that evolve in form throughout the lives of the plants. These are chosen for their structure, form, texture and color, showcasing many different varieties in his compositions. He has pioneered an approach to gardening that embraces the full life-cycle of plants. He states, "My work aims to bring nature back into human surroundings and this pavilion provides the opportunity for people to reflect and relax in a contemplative garden away from the busy metropolis".

“A garden is the most intimate landscape ensemble I know of. It is close to us. There we cultivate the plants we need. A garden requires care and protection. And so we encircle it, we defend it and fend for it. We give it shelter. The garden turns into a place.”

— Peter Zumthor

Icelandic Architecture / Derived from Landscape

Visitor Center (Þingvellir National Park)

With 800 hot springs, 10,000 waterfalls, 15 active volcanos, and 4500 square miles of glaciers, Iceland offers an incredibly active and vast landscape that can not be ignored. Throughout history, the country's isolation as an island nation has helped deter major European influences for years, retaining local building practices and ideas, confirming the innate Scandinavian feeling for nature and its materials.

Icelandic Influence: The Basalt Rock Cliffs and Black Sand Beaches

Harpa Theatre and Conference Center (Reykjavik, Iceland): Facade Influenced by Iceland's Northern Sunlight and Rock Cliff Formations

Church of Stykkisholmskirkja (Stykkishólmur, Iceland)

Modular Eco-Lodges (Stykkishólmur, Iceland): Use of Easily Available Materials of Construction Combined with the Ease and Simplicity of Design.