Asphalt Gardens

Master thesis (2018)

Authors

V. Alexandridis Architecture and the Built Environment

Contributors

S.E. Frausto Berlage - Architecture and the Built Environment (mentor)
I Avissar (mentor)
T Weaver (mentor)
Faculty
Architecture and the Built Environment, Architecture and the Built Environment
Copyright: © 2018 Vasileios Alexandridis
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Published Date

01-02-2018

Language

English

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Faculty

Architecture and the Built Environment

Abstract

Asphalt Gardens are a landscape intervention alongside the E17 Highway that connects Belgium and France.
The project looks at the idea of highway landscape as a pastoral landscape. It deals with what is artificial and natural, with the idea of perceiving something through a window frame, through speed. It deals with the specific environment of the Eurometropoils and by extension the northern European Landscape. Appreciating the as found condition as a given situation of the motorway landscape, Asphalt Gardens provokes the ideas of beauty. They don’t acquire borrowed beauty but they celebrate the rough and artificial highway landscape.
The manner of our regard to discarded artifacts, such us the ordinary highway defines the way we look landscapes and how we can create gardens. The highway landscape has a particular aesthetic language and beauty. In the same context, a garden next to a highway can be beautiful if it refers to the highway.
The project focuses on the highway landscape as a particular post-industrial territory which deserves attention because of its dominance and use.
The world landscape gradually changed in meaning through the last two centuries. First it meant the picture of a view, an artist’s interpretation of a scenery. Informal landscape tradition, such as the 18th century English gardens designed from Humphrey Repton, was influenced by the pastoral landscape. The gardeners, with a similar way as the painters of pastoral and picturesque landscapes, decided what to include or omit in their design. They created stylized, picturesque landscapes, leaving out from the composition the muddy roads.
In this logic, the garden consists of a series of pictorial compositions. In each of these pictures we find the basic principles of harmony, unity and contrast. In the landscape paintings of Jacob van Ruisdel and Van Goyen, the northern European landscape is depicting as an as found condition and that makes it pastoral. In many of the paintings the idea of harmony between the man-made and the natural is introduced with the ruin. The artificial is taken over from the natural and the ruin harmonizes the two contradictory principles.
Aspalt Gardens recontextualize existing artifacts and reflects the reality in a way that provokes relations between objects and materials that are taken for granted. They suggest a new reading and observation of the ordinary landscape.