SLA A/S, Copenhagen
In 2002, the Landscape Architects SLA A/S of Copenhagen were the first recipients of the European Landscape Award - awarded by Topos in collaboration with Bruns Pflanzen - for their outstanding urban and landscape planning activities and for the sensual qualities of their works.
Their projects, which perpetuate the tradition of Scandinavian landscape design, have aroused great interest internationally. Since its foundation ten years ago by Stig L. Andersson, the office has become an interdisciplinary forum for designing new urban experience parks.
SLA devotes special attention to choice of materials and their possible applications, as well as to their potential modification through the effects of time and weathering. The formal language used by the Danish planners is simultaneously willfully idiosyncratic and evolved out of the features of a specific locale. Playful and sober, functional and full of fantasy, their projects consistently reflect a fascination for the vital sensuality of the city.
The title of this Aedes exhibition ‘Wunderstadt’ (City of Wonders) refers to the 16th century forerunner of the museum, the ‘Wunderkammer’ (cabinet of curiosities/wonders), an accumulation of rare objects. Like such a Wunderkammer, the exhibition invites viewers to delectation and the sensuous perception of urban everyday life.
The realized works of SLA – for instance Ankar Park in Malmö, Charlotte Garden in Copenhagen, five new squares in Frederiksberg, Norresundby City Garden in Aalborg, and the Bjoervika urban development project at Oslo Harbor – are never definitively concluded, but are instead subject to processes of ceaseless change. These processes are also thematized in the exhibition.
Welcome
Kristin Feireiss AedesBerlin
Gabriele Kiefer Berlin
An Aedes catalogue will be published. (€ 10.-)
