Excerpt: NDSM Lusthof by Studio Ossidiana is imagined as a place of action, work, experimentation, and leisure: a contemporary pleasure garden on the banks of Amsterdam’s port. Within the former shipyards, it becomes a port for soil, plants, and minerals, a circular world-observatory open to people, plants, and animals, where openings frame the cardinal points and the solstices mark the passing of the seasons.
Project Description
[Text as submitted by architect] Gardening is an earthly endeavour, where choices are made daily between keeping and removing, responding to the weather, soil conditions, the seasons, as well as one’s desires, and capacity to commit hours of work.
The garden is also a metaphor, an embodied escape which, like the carpet, can give materiality to ideas of paradise. Saint Francis is said to have had his garden closed on three sides, with one left open to the world, to the unknowns outside of it.
Ottoman gardens cherished asymmetries, collecting an ecumenical variety of medicinal and ornamental plants from different parts of the world, perhaps a reflection of their nomadic history. The Dutch Lusthoven, beautiful pleasure gardens which flourished in the golden age, were often accessible only by boat, an exclusive fragment of the world where a limited perfection would reign.
Every garden is both a map, as it proposes an idea of the world, and it is a living fragment of the world itself, where life and death, composition and decomposition, unfold.
We imagined a garden for NDSM which would be a place of action, of work, as well as one of experimentation and leisure: a contemporary Lusthof born on the banks of Amsterdam’s port, open to people, plants, and animals from the world.
Within the former shipyards, we imagined it as a port made for soil, plants, and minerals, a circular world-observatory where to stay, to look into, and from which to observe the world around it: a sequence of openings frame the cardinal points, as well as direct the gaze towards the axis of dawn and dusk during the summer and winter solstices, marking the passing of the seasons.
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