In the coming weeks, months and years on the Vitra campus in Vejle am Rhein, in the meadow between the flagship showroom VitraHaus and the production complex Alvaro Siza, a perennial garden will be cultivated by the Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf. The official opening of the garden is scheduled for June 2021.
Work on the creation of the new garden began in May 2020. It will take patience to see the landscape in full bloom, but within a few months, visitors to the Vitra Campus will be able to appreciate the first sketches of the artfully formed landscape environment.
The 75-year-old Dutchman is considered one of the first in a generation of garden designers who, in the late 1980s, began to redefine established practices, considering traditional garden architecture to be overly decorative, labor-intensive and resource-intensive. They turned to perennial, often self-healing plants, shrubs, grasses, and wildflowers that were not previously considered garden plants, as well as irregular plantings.
Audolf himself does not consider himself the founder of any movement. “I do not presume to argue who I really am. For some, I'm just a gardener,”he says casually. The gardener, however, who in recent decades has been entrusted with the design of urban gardens around the world, including commissioned by the London
the Serpentine Gallery and the Venice Biennale (where he received a special prize), and his project for New York's High Line Boardwalk set a new direction for urban gardening.
“In the early decades of the Vitra campus, the issue of landscaping was not raised. The landscape work began only in the process of connecting the northern and southern parts of the campus, with the projects of Alvaro Siza (
Alvaro Siza Promenade) and Gunther Vogt. The Pete Audolf Garden will be a new facet of the ensemble and a source of new, ever-changing experiences for visitors,”explains Rolf Felbaum, Chairman Emeritus of Vitra.
At the heart of all Audolf's projects is the idea of a landscape that looks "pristine" and "untamed", but which cannot exist in this form without detailed planning and equally careful maintenance. The Audolf Gardens play out on certain social beliefs about wildlife. “I'm just trying to turn our shared fantasies into reality,” comments the designer. However, his gardens are not "wild" at all.
Audolf strives to achieve a balanced composition or formation of, in his own words, "communities" of plants with pronounced strengths and weaknesses, different flowering periods and life cycles, so that a visit to the garden evokes an emotional response all year round, both during the height of the flowering season and wilting period.
This requires careful organization, including accurate scheduling and painstaking sourcing of suitable plants and potential suppliers, in addition to the planting pattern, which in the case of Pete Audolf looks like a work of art in itself.
This also applies to the plan that underlies the Audolf project at the Vitra campus. Around 30,000 plants will be used in the garden, including species with such mysterious names as Persicaria amplexicaule “Alba”, Echinacea pallida “Hula dancer” or Molinia, purple moth, “Moorhexe”. They form the basis of a garden that largely dispenses with built structures, but at the same time refuses to serve as a simple decoration for the surrounding architecture. The landscape complements the campus buildings and provides them with new perspectives, as Audolf emphasizes.
The garden is designed to divert the attention of campus visitors from buildings to the ground, creating a state of inspiring disorientation as they walk winding paths among plants in a vain search for strict geometry with straight lines and a clear compositional center.“I want people to 'get lost' in my garden, not just walk through it,” sums up Audolf, striving to ensure that visitors to his gardens have experiences that are both emotional and aesthetic.
For Pete Audolf, a former bartender and fishmonger, plants are more than the organic matter he uses to decorate his gardens. According to the designer, his relationship with the plant world borders on obsession. “Plants for me are personalities that I can use and arrange according to their appearance and behavior. Each plant plays in its own way, but the end result is bound to be a fascinating play."
If the weather and other global circumstances turn out to be favorable, the initial results of the flower theater rehearsals will be visible on the Vitra campus by September. But that's just the beginning, Audolf explains. “This is not the same as drawing a picture and hanging it on the wall. I create a picture and let it grow and wither."
Materials for publication provided by Vitra
