For my end of year dissertation project I put together an ecological parkland as I felt this would show off my knowledge in horticulture and design at the same time. As a designer it is my vision to see the man made landscape of the world as a fusion of social diversity and bio diversity. A lot of people I know feel differently about this, for them it is one or the other and any attempt to mix the two is too much of a compromise and will fail to be of a great benefit to either wild life or the civilised population.
For me this is my dream, it is what I believe to be the best way to design and I think in the near future it will be viewed as the only way to design if we want to live on a sustainable planet with a consistently growing population.
The site I chose was in Ireland, Dublin at the foot of the Dublin mountains, which gave me a fantastic opportunity to terrace the site and create a naturalistic water course that could be worked into the planting scheme and promote bio diversity as well as adding visual interest to people using the park.
Below I've put some sections and visualisations showing a selected part of the site in detail.
As well as sections and visualisations a portion of the site was blown up to really capture the scheme and unique layout of the site which also included underground wildlife tunnels that channelled under the existing road to allow for a safe alternative for animal life passing through the site.
The design incorporated a learning and cultural centre that was developed to the concept stage of design, it was designed to maximise natural light, encompass a green roof and encourage visitors from all over the country to be attracted to the site and come and visit. A basic floor plan and materials specification was put together to help realise the scheme.
Visualisations for the entire site were inspired by views from key points within the scheme, highlighting the aspects of the site that capture the concept and atmosphere at its best.
As well as creating a scheme that heavily promoted bio-diversity and that gave all the scrub land specific uses, I also included a land art project to act as the sites land mark. Something people would associate with the park, something to give this ecological park a unique identity. The land art consisted of a series of cars, all beaten and rusted, placed along the scheme of the sight partially buried into the land and totally engrossed in vegetation. Each car had in the shadows a silhouette cut out of a deer (one of the local animals already existing on the sight) the idea behind it was that with all mans rampant creation and dominance of Mother nature that one day nature will get it's revenge and take back what man has taken from her. In this case the deer symbolises Mother nature and the art leads us to believe that the gentle, innocent deer is responsible for mans inevitable demise.
Below is a photo montage of the proposed land art sequence.
Below is an image of the construction details that accompany the tree top walk way in the ecological park, at intervals throughout the support beams is a climbing plant that is being put there to grow up the bridge and mask the structure so that it ties in more successfully with teh the theme of the ecological park.
