Feature

Housing the Future
A Swedish housing exposition aims to marry sustainability and urban form.
By Kenneth Helphand, FASLA

Many American communities hold an annual Street of Dreams, a tour of houses, typically part of new developments, intended to showcase residential architecture, landscape, and interior design. Exhibited for a short period of time, the homes are purchased and their true life then begins. A European version of a street of dreams was held in Malmö, Sweden, from May through September 2001. However, this street was not limited to upscale housing, nor was it an example of local firms promoting themselves. This was a housing exposition constructed with the intention to exhibit ideas in sustainability, urban form, and landscape architecture, and then to assume its life as the core of a new community for the city of Malmö.

The exposition is known as Bo01, which stands for "living 2001," and it is Sweden's first international housing exposition—but it is also much more. Compared to the paltry, privatized visions of happiness of Street of Dreams, Bo01 has a grander aspiration. Billed as a city of tomorrow demonstrating an ecologically sustainable city, the intention is to "demonstrate how intelligently utilized information technology, dignified welfare solutions, and pleasurable, sensual beauty can make the sustainable city so attractive that it will be chosen in our time."

Bo01 includes the permanent construction of housing and open spaces, temporary exposition buildings, and a garden exposition. The construction is the first stage of a new urban area for Malmö. The site is Vastra Mamnen, a derelict industrial area that had a history of shipyards and factories. It is a dramatic waterfront site, but it was also a flat, windswept, almost featureless landfill. Landscape architect Agneta Persson was director of exhibition planning and was responsible for the master plan. Although this was a housing exposition, landscape architecture was a focus of the project, and landscape architects were engaged in the design from the outset.

The overall plan called for housing surrounded by parkland and the sea. The residential area is a loose grid of structures built around courtyards of variable size and character. For phase one, five hundred high- and low-rise, multifamily, terrace, and detached homes by 20 different architects have been completed or are under construction. Within the housing area, 20 gardens have been designed, protected intimate pockets in contrast to the expansive and exposed seashore (see map opposite).

The massing of the structures is especially sensitive to the windy nature of the site, with the houses serving as windbreaks. The integration of inside and out, structure and open space is striking, especially in this northern environment. My visit was in summer, and it will be interesting to note how the design will function in the Swedish winter with its long nights.

This is a demonstration "green" city in multidimensional ways—both in terms of sustainability and as an urban form that is equally composed of buildings and courtyards, gardens, parks, plaza, and esplanade. Local renewable energy sources include wind, solar power, and biogas that will heat and power the neighborhood. Surface water is drained off visibly in open gutters and miniature canals in alleyways before reaching the saltwater canal or Öresund. Automobiles have only limited access, with pedestrians and cyclists having priority in all areas. Large trees were planted from the outset. There is also a "green" system that is part of on-site development. For example, green points are given for designs that benefit biodiversity in the courtyard areas, such as planting beds, nesting boxes, bat boxes, wildflower plantings, areas left to natural succession, nonpermeable areas, ponds, stormwater collection and retention, and green roofs.

Three new parks flank the residential core. Each of these parks fronts the water and capitalizes on that location addressing the sea or canal, and each has areas away from the water's edge. A canal runs through the entire site and acts as a border along the eastern edge of the housing area. A paved quay abuts the apartments on one bank.

Ankarparken (Anchor Park), designed by Stig L. Andersson, is on the other bank facing the housing. The biomorphic paved shoreline is periodically punctuated by stones that are too small for the large space. Adjoining this variegated edge is a series of zones corresponding to four distinct Swedish biotopes: alder swamp, beech woodland, oak woodland, and marine zone. This park's planting is new; it is difficult to imagine its full impact. The intent is that it will evolve into distinct islands linked by wooden footbridges and surfboard-like platforms that also jut out into the water channel, a whimsical touch. Currently it appears a bit jumbled; hopefully the maturation of plant material will ameliorate that.

The Daniaparken to the north was designed by Thorbjorn Anderson and Pege Hillinge of FFNS of Stockholm. All of the elements of the design confront this windswept locale, either in protection from its forces or as a bowsprit-like projection from the plaza over the sea. The most characteristic features of the park are three walled areas that punctuate the riprapped edge of boulders, creating small "beaches," pockets of paved stepped platforms leading into the sea. They afford surprising intimacy and wind protection in the midst of vast space. These enclosures are echoed at a higher elevation, in balconies that look across the intervening green lawn and allée. The Daniaparken is terminated by two large open plazas, one to the north—a grand platform with a planned bowsprit projection into the sea—and the other, the Scaniaplatsen (Citizen's Square), lying at the end of the cross axis that roughly bisects the emerging neighborhood. These were not yet completed during my visit in July, nor was a proposed granite zig-zag water channel leading toward the sea.

The most dramatic open space is the Sundspromenaden (Quayside Promenade), designed by Danish landscape architect Jeppe Aagaard Anderson. This is a 220-meter-long esplanade along the seashore that connects the Scaniaplatsen at one end and a marina at the other. The main feature is a continuous wooden stairway and platform capping the stone shore. On the seaside it is a continuous boardwalk overlooking the sea and the riprap. This is adjacent to the stepped wooden and elegantly detailed strand. People sit both ways on the wooden mound, peering toward the sea or inward toward the activity of cafes and restaurants strung along the way. There is no shade, but this is Sweden, where people revel in the short summer sunlight. The inspirations and connections are many. It is part boardwalk, pier, ship's deck, windscreen, and grand stoop for the adjacent houses. A bold gesture, minimalist in its sensibility, its scale is commensurate with the vast sea and horizon.

The temporary expositions of Bo01 have closed, but the new community is a permanent development. It was supplemented by the temporary expositions that have already been dismantled. At the east entrance to the site a new landscape was created that served as the framework for the temporary garden expositions. In 1999 eight hectares of this sterile landfill were planted in Salix vimnalis, known in Sweden as wicker wood, a "bamboo of the north." Fast growing and pliable, it grew five feet in four months and was then cut back to encourage a dense thicket, which was trimmed to a height of three meters. After the closing of the housing exposition, the willows were to be harvested for wood chips. Ten landscape architects, architects, and artists were each given a 20-meter-square space, creating 10 secret gardens (giardino segredo) within the mass of willows. Designers were given a choice of themes: to display existence, passion, illusion, or evolution. Eventually the gardens were organized by theme in four loops off a meandering spine, but that aspect is largely obscured. The responses to the charge varied in approach: narrative, didactic, or metaphorical.

Martha Schwartz, the sole American designer participating in the exposition, erected an artificial "Weeping Willow." This "tree of the future" was festooned with bright green plastic streamers all set within an Astroturf court. I was told that many of the streamers are now gone, blown away or tangled up, but it was still a striking sight in mid-July. Intended to impose artificiality in the midst of "nature," it was also appealing, and made all the more poignant, paradoxical, and a bit cute by the taped sound of weeping.

Dutch landscape architect Adriaan Geuze's contribution was a platform raised 12 meters in the air and supported by a jumbled pile of 200 pine poles, looking like a giant pile of pick-up-sticks. It has a dramatic physical presence, but it was a conceptual work. The aerial garden supported is a displaced piece of Öresund seabed, lifting above one's head what lies beneath the landfill. This was largely left to the imagination, for the garden above was accessible at rare times by ladder. (Visitors had to be roped for safety.)

Carl Johan De Geer, a Swedish artist who is not a garden designer, created "The Hermitage." It included an enchanting fairy tale cottage and an adjacent inaccessible mound topped by a single chair. It had the whimsical yet serious air of Dr. Seuss. Frenchman Lionel Bouvier created a "Potager Urbain," an urban kitchen garden with plants growing in oil drums and with superscaled plant identification tags all placed atop a floor of graffiti. The hybrid ensemble of materials, graphics, and imagery was both playful and provocative. The design by Norsk Form, a Norwegian group of designers, was bold in geometry and concept. Carved out of the willow wood, a square was ringed by benches. At the center was a design intended to be replicated at other locales as "The Good Meeting Point." It was a circular wavy wooden platform leading to a wooden beach. Its sculpted terrain, a subtly warped deck, recalled Maya Lin's Wave Garden at the University of Michigan and its inviting pockets. It also suggested the inviting comforts of lounge chairs and hot tubs. If this is a good meeting point, as a political proposition it suggests gathering around places of pleasure.

The permanent components of Bo01 are still under construction and during the exposition were visited daily by thousands, so it is difficult to fully evaluate the area as living space. Once completed, the area will have sufficient population and density to have an internal coherence, and its dramatic locale and dynamic design will hopefully draw visitors to the site.

At Bo01, green environmental values, enlightened social policy, and a sophisticated sensibility were all brought to bear on the design. These forces were not in petty competition but acted as reinforcing agendas. Some of this is surely the product of Scandinavia's unabashed confidence in the role of design and planning, in its most comprehensive and enlightened sense. The bold visions at Bo01 are difficult to imagine in the United States, where housing as an instrument of social and environmental policy is largely left to the private sector. Surely our conditions are different, but we would certainly benefit in seeking other models and adapting them to our circumstances, or our street of dreams will remain a dead end. LA

Kenneth Helphand, FASLA, is professor of landscape architecture at the University of Oregon and a recipient of the university's Distinguished Teaching Award. He is editor of Landscape Journal.