Ganz Landscape Architects’ studio will be closed for the Christmas holidays. You can reach our team again starting 4 January 2021.

We wish you all happy and peaceful holidays!
 

Gschwellti is a traditional Swiss dish! Gschwellti means potatoes boiled in their skins, served with a lovely assortment of cheeses. The beauty of this meal is its simplicity. As very little preparation is required, this meal is on the table quickly. That’s what happened this week in our studio. Eating lunch together at noon is a high point of the day. We chat, share and enjoy this brief get-together at midday.

Five ‘Placebo’ prints focus completely on the power of colours. Artist Marco Ganz shows his latest works in a relief printed edition in an exhibition at Wolfsberg Publishing. The effect of each “Interaction of Colour” relies on an exotic pairing of two potent colours that mutually enhance each other. As different people respond differently to different Placebos, different variants are offered.

Exhibition, Now to 6 February 2021
Fridays and Saturdays
12:00–4:00 p.m.

Steindruckerei Wolfensberger AG
Eglistrasse 8
8004 Zurich

In Altdorf the renovation and rebuilding of Uri Cantonal Hospital has been underway for two years. The new construction is being built according to plans by Darlington Meier Architects. Ganz Landscape Architects are planning the hospital park, with lush vegetation as the park setting and diverse sightlines, visual connections and landscape windows opening up views to the Altdorf mountain panorama.  

Work on the grounds of the new hospital park will begin in 2021 and should be completed by 2025. Our landscape architect and project manager Paul Junker explains what the park will look like in the future in this interview with the Urner Wochenblatt.
 

Excavation: time-lapse

With Triumphant Scale, the Kunstmuseum Bern is showing the work of El Anatsui, the great sculptor from Ghana. His large sculptures of recycled bottle caps that decorate whole walls like magnificent tapestries can currently be experienced via a virtual tour through the rooms of the museum. With countless helpers El Anatsui reworks thousands of used bottle caps, parts of tin cans and other discarded objects, cuts them open, rolls, folds, crushes, pierces them and threads them together with copper wires to produce art works of monumental weightlessness. These poetic whole-wall decorations are broadly reminiscent of landscapes and topographies, which are especially inspiring to us landscape architects.

With an awareness of the limits to natural resources, it makes sense to reuse materials, also in garden design. Clay roof tiles, which otherwise end up in dumpsters, can be used to build simple paths between garden beds. Plain tiles called Biberschwanzziegel, with their half round bottom edges, work well for this purpose. In addition to the half round shape of the lower edge, plain tiles are traditionally also available in several other shapes, such as arched, flat, curved or angular. Each type of roof tile shape creates a different, characteristic structuring.

The long-term project ‘The Garden’ of Tom Emerson’s studio/chair at ETH Zurich is taking on new forms. The architecture students are placing circular levels in the surrounding meadow in a carpetlike fashion. The structures are made up of woven willow rods. The newly created areas provide a basis for a tree nursery that will serve The Garden in the future.

During the Open House Zurich weekend, various historical and contemporary buildings of architectural interest in Zurich will be opening their doors to the general public. This year, landscape architecture and urban planning stand in the foreground of the event, as the time of isolation and closures has increased our awareness of just how much outdoor areas in the city contribute to the quality of life. Ganz Landscape Architects will lead guided tours of the C. G. Jung garden in Küsnacht and the Signau Garden in Zurich on Saturday, 26 September and Sunday, 27 September.

Ganz Landscape Architects went on an excursion to Basel. Our programme took us to the workshops of Glassworks Matteo Gonet, where Matteo Gonet showed us the craft of glass making, with its great variety of possibilities. The next day, under the expert guidance of Thomas Freivogel, we visited the Hörnli cemetery, the park at Wenkenhof, and the Lange-Erlen recreation area. We then went to Rheinhafen, where—together with landscape architect and wildlife ecologist André Rey—we are managing a test series of boxes to promote wild bee species. In the afternoon we visited Kloster Schönthal near Langenbruck, where we hiked the paths and trails together to view site-specific sculptures by contemporary artists. Finally, on Saturday as the last events of our 3-day excursion, we visited the Edward Hopper exhibition at the Beyeler-Museum in Riehen and, in the afternoon, the landscaped park at the Ermitage of Arlesheim created at the end of the 18th century, about which historian Dr. Vanja Hug shared her expert knowledge.

In the context of the motion for ecologically valuable landscaping in the City of Zurich, Ganz Landscape Architects, in close collaboration with landscape architect and wildlife ecologist André Rey, is placing fibre cement (Eternit) boxes filled with loess in Rheinhafen von Basel, along the SBB railway track fields and on the site of the Futureplanter Plant Nursery in Zürich-Affoltern. The aim of this test series is to promote wild bee species that inhabit steep faces, so that they can then be settled at the new Allmend School in Zurich, which is currently under development by Studio Burkhardt architects.

Ganz Landscape Architects will have summer holidays from 27th July to 7th August 2020. During this time we will be working with a reduced staff. The entire team will be back at work for you on 10th August 2020.

Cooking has a lot to do with daily life, and it unites important elements of our world! When we cook, we make use of nature and create something new. We cook and eat together with others; we take in the world and share it. We firmly believe that our experience with food also has an impact on our activities as landscape architects, namely, when it takes form in everyday working life. Under the expert guidance of our Laura and Maja, we devote an evening to the making of homemade pasta by hand. With a meal together on the next day we celebrate giving and sharing. Eating is like breathing—it sustains us and influences our activities every day!

Right on time for the opening of this year’s swimming and recreation season, Ganz Landscape Architects has placed the new sun umbrellas in Tiefenbrunnen Bad and Park in Zurich. With their red colour, the approximately 15 sun umbrellas create a distinctive contrast in the area of the children’s paddling pool.

Above the Rychenberg in Winterthur, an architecture garden sits enthroned on top of a high retaining wall; together with a landscape garden, it belongs to Villa Tössertobel. Here, over a hundred years ago, the merchant Georg Reinhart sought to capture a hint of Far Eastern charm. A Buddha, surrounded by climbing knotweed, stands in the “sun baths”, or monastery garden, as Reinhart called this square courtyard enclosed by arcades, with an open square of lawn and a water basin in the centre. During an expert guided tour by Winterthur architect Peter Kunz, Ganz Landscape Architects got a look at this private refuge of the Reinhart family.

Ganz Landscape Architects then visited Obere Alpgut, which architect Peter Kunz developed, where Jakob Sulzer and later his son Heinrich Sulzer had a villa built in the mid-nineteenth century.

 

A small task brings true salvation, as Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006) knew.

In Bad and Park Tiefenbrunnen, Ganz Landscape Architects has positioned a new wooden deck. The deck nestles close to the striking circular Teepavillon [tea pavilion] designed by architect Josef Schütz and built in the 1950s.
With the opening of this year’s swimming and recreation season on 8 June, this temporary intervention will be used as an extension of the restaurant’s outside terrace, with stunning views of Lake Zurich towards the Glarus Alps and the summit Vrenelisgärtli.

Ganz Landscape Architects is expanding its postcard series to include additional themes.
Inspired by a trip to South India and to Chandigarh—the capital city of the new Indian Punjab, constructed after partition based on plans by Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier, we are adding selected images of landscape, architecture, and art from that excursion.
This postcard series fits well in our Collection, which contains stored memories, and thus represents another excursion into a field of knowledge that interests us as landscape architects.

Manfred Papst: How are you spending your days – now that you no longer write at all?
Peter Bichsel: I don’t need a lot to happen. I like the boredom. I have no difficulty with it. I am good at sitting there and doing nothing and feeling glad that I am alive. I live alone here in the house, get up early in the morning and immediately start cooking, rather elaborately, a whole meal. Then I eat and lie down again.

Freely translated from NNZ am Sonntag, 29 March 2020

With our new ‘Culinarium’ Ganz Landscape Architects celebrate dedication and passion for daily life, or in other words, as expressed by Carlo Scarpa: “Man muss auch ‘Gourmet’ sein, wenn man ein guter Architekt sein will” [To be a good architect you also have to be a gourmet].

Our work with landscapes also frequently leads us to assignments with a historical context. Through the physical experience of walking the location, we explore the site with its spatial qualities, its vegetation and materiality. We go to archives and look for old plans and documents. The knowledge gained is then put together in texts, plans and pictures, and from this we develop a design concept for the work.

A few days ago, we had the privilege of presenting a client with a feasibility study for ‘Florina’, an architectural ensemble of historic buildings on Lake Lucerne (Vierwaldstättersee). As structural changes are planned, Ganz Landscape Architects was engaged for this delicate task. First, we gained an overview of the history of Florina, focusing on the design language, the structural materialization and the use of plants. From this we derived appropriate development suggestions for the future handling of the Florina ensemble and its gardens.
 

Studio Exhibition Jürg Altherr

As the Jürg Altherr studio exhibition held last October has received a great deal of interest, the rooms at the Schlieren gasworks site are being reopened to the art-loving public. The exhibition is well worth seeing. Showing Altherr's habitat and laboratory, it gives visitors a another look at the stage and place of collection and smorgasbord of things.

AZB Arbeitsgemeinschaft Zürcher Bildhauer [The working group of Zurich's sculptors (AZB)]
Turmstrasse 5
8952 Schlieren

Saturday, 29 February, 12 – 7 p.m.
Sunday, 1 March, 12 – 5 p.m.

Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967) is one of the most important artists working today. The Kunsthaus Zurich is now presenting a large solo exhibition, for which Eliasson has developed new works. At the centre is a large installation that touches upon an important subject in our time: the relationship and interplay between human beings and the other life-forms and species on Earth.

Eliasson’s works are often evocative of scientific configurations and deal with physical phenomena of nature, such as light, water, movement and reflection. The artist is interested in perception itself and invites us to view the world and ourselves with fresh eyes, to sense and smell and probe things anew and thus in a new way. For Eliasson, art must also be socially relevant. Themes and concerns such as climate change, migration and the handling of our planet’s resources play a central role in his work. The exhibition has been created exclusively for viewing at the Kunsthaus Zurich.

17 January – 22 March 2020
Curator: Mirjam Varadinis

Kunsthaus Zurich
Heimplatz 1
8001 Zurich

Tues, Fri–Sun 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Wed, Thurs 10 a.m. – 8 p.m.