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CITIES - sculptures and land art
Groningen
Clearing Groningen NL
In 1990, the
Centrum Beeldende Kunst (CBK) Groningen commissioned me to create a proposal
for their project Voorbeeldige Opdrachten: 12 monumentale beeldende
kunstopdrachten. My proposal was for a land artwork on the urban
periphery, where the city projects like peninsulas into the surrounding
landscape.
My proposal responded to the specific character of the
Groningen landscape: vast, flat farmlands and polder, where large stretches
of new forest were planned. I proposed using this new forest to create an
environmental artwork that references how wooded land was cleared in past
centuries.
The design uses architectural forms that echo urban
public space. A kilometer-long entrance path is flanked by two rows of
oak trees. Their foliage would be regularly cut to form a flat, vertical
plane. The flat foliage would be much like the row of trees that flanked
the Grand Terrace of Le Nôtre's palace gardens in Saint Germain en Laye
in France, evoking the feeling of walking between building facades. The
tree trunks themselves would resemble a classical colonnade. Beyond the
immediate path, these two rows would continue into the connecting
forest, their positioning gradually becoming more random and mixing with
various indigenous tree species.
At the end of the
kilometer long path there is a clearing - with the colonnade continuing
along its perimeter. The form of this urban-like square is the same as that
of the inner spaces of monumental classical architecture.
My proposal,
titled "Clearing," was presented in 1990 at the exhibition of exemplary
projects in Groningen, in which "Clearing" was presented. The city later
realized the separate Stadsmarkeringen project (master planned by Daniel
Libeskind), which includes works like William Forsythe's City marker
S07 from the same year, where a four-hundred-meter row of willows was
also planted. While my own proposal was not realized, this page documents
its concept for those interested in the history of such plans for Groningen.
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