Landscape

“Guiwan Park is a bold, responsible, and balanced exemplar of new urban landscape infrastructure. The transformation from hermetic canal to woven green infrastructure in just two years is a model for all waterfront cities.” – 2023 Awards Jury. In mid-October 2023, the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) held its annual awards ceremony in Minneapolis, USA. Among the international contenders, the Qianhai Guiwan Park project, led by Field Operations, is the only non-U.S. project from China that received the annual Professional General Design Honor Award. This groundbreaking project, Qianhai Guiwan Park, brought together a multidisciplinary team of experts from over 19 fields including engineering, geology, transportation, architecture, and structural engineering. It serves as a testament to China’s prowess in construction and innovation, as the team collectively tackled a global challenge with daring innovation and unwavering dedication. Notably, core members of the team from Field Operations, involved since 2016, proudly represented the project at the esteemed awards ceremony. Through its trailblazing approach and cutting-edge engineering, Qianhai Guiwan Park is not only reshaping the landscape but also transforming the way people live, offering a distinctive contribution to societal advancement.

The planting activity for a new garden by the Dutch designer Piet Oudolf started in May 2020 on the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein. It will take some patience for the landscaping to reach full bloom, but in just a few months visitors will be able to enjoy initial glimpses of the artfully composed wilderness. The 75-year-old Dutchman is regarded as a pioneer for a generation of garden designers who in the late 1980s began to question conventional practices, finding traditional landscape gardening too decorative, labor-intensive and resource-consuming. Instead, they turned to perennial, often self-regenerating plants, shrubs, grasses, bushes and wildflowers, which had been long ignored as garden plants, and favored an equally unconventional layout of the plantings.