Re-wetting Grossbeeren
Award of Excellence
Student Collaboration
Grossbeeren, Brandenburg, Germany
Emily Kim, Student ASLA;
Elias Bennett, Student ASLA;
Faculty Advisors:
Chris Reed, ASLA;
Laila Seewang;
Harvard University
Evocative landscape imagination from the phenomena of functional environmental needs. Simple, elegant and believable. An artistic project and compelling graphics to illustrate the regenerative potential of landscape. Beautiful, meaningful, and poetic work. Purposeful use of models significantly enriched the overall outcome. The Jury appreciate the true collaboration here; stating this will serve you both well as you move forward into practice or academia. Keep the interdisciplinary work up.
- 2025 Awards Jury
Project Statement
Re-wetting Großbeeren reimagines a former sewage field outside Berlin as a human-induced peatland that sequesters carbon, restores biodiversity, and fosters new forms of ecological stewardship. By transforming a defunct infrastructural landscape into a climate-adaptive habitat, the project models sustainable land management, flood mitigation, and carbon sink strategies. Both territorial machine and regional park, the project intersects ecological restoration with the need to foster new intimacies between people and peat, which will be vital if either is to persist. It invites public engagement with climate resilience through design, demonstrating how post-industrial sites can become regenerative infrastructures for a warming world.
Project Narrative
Re-wetting Großbeeren transforms a former sewage field on the outskirts of Berlin into a climate-adaptive peatland, positioning landscape architecture as a critical agent in reimagining degraded infrastructure for a more resilient future. The site, once part of a vast sewage system engineered to absorb Berlin’s urban waste, now sits fallow, its subsurface soils still etched with the legacy of drainage, extraction, and contamination. This project proposes a speculative but grounded rewetting strategy to activate the site’s ecological, hydrological, and cultural potential—foregrounding landscape as both a restorative system and a public educator.
Rather than erasing the site’s infrastructural past, the project draws upon its latent topographies—sunken beds, berms, and ditches—to choreograph water flow and saturation levels in service of induced peatland formation. These emergent wetlands are framed not only as carbon sinks, but as seasonal classrooms, public paths, and living laboratories where ecological processes and cultural memory converge. Through sectional studies, hydrological mapping, and programmatic overlays, the design envisions the site as a mosaic of wet ecologies and human-scale interventions.
Developed through close collaboration between graduate students of landscape architecture and architecture, the project merges systems thinking with spatial storytelling. Landscape strategies include targeted rewetting of historic sewage beds and vegetative succession using peat-forming species. Architectural insertions provide access, amplify site experience, and facilitate environmental and experiential discovery. The design is rooted in an ethic of minimal intervention—working with existing forms, materials, and water flows to achieve maximum ecological transformation.
Re-wetting Großbeeren advances principles of environmental sensitivity and sustainability by centering peatland regeneration as a long-term strategy for carbon sequestration, groundwater recharge, and habitat restoration. It embraces the complexity of climate adaptation in peri-urban landscapes, where competing land uses and histories of contamination complicate ecological restoration. The project models how formerly utilitarian infrastructure can be reframed not as wastelands, but as vital, regenerative spaces.
Importantly, the design does not aim for a fixed end state but instead proposes a flexible framework that anticipates ecological change over time. Seasonal wetness, shifting vegetation patterns, and community engagement are embraced as part of a dynamic landscape process. This long-view approach supports both ecological succession and public reinterpretation of the site’s past—offering lessons for other landscapes shaped by waste, extraction, and decline.
In a moment when Europe and the world are urgently seeking scalable climate strategies, Re-wetting Großbeeren offers a replicable and site-specific model for restoring degraded lands while building public literacy in climate resilience. It stands as a compelling case for the role of landscape architecture in shaping the aesthetics, ethics, and ecologies of the Anthropocene.
Plant List:
- Sphagnum moss
- Common Reed (Phragmites)
- Reed Canary Grass
- Water Sedge
- Cattail
- Alder
- Willow