Railway Cover

An unusual open space project has been opened in the Munich city quarter of Theresienhoehe in June 2010. After a ten-year process, which took the design from an international competition through to the realized project, the new quarter on the former site of the Munich fair is now endowed with the identity of a hybrid art-landscape space. Covering a length of 300 metres and spanning 50 metres in width, the space is an artificial landscape build over a pre-existing thin railway cover. Nature and artificiality are blended through landscape architecture and art, and joined into one. The public park references travellers’ dreams and reacts to the lines of movement of the functional railway below. Arranged as a play-way, alpine meadows and pine-framed dunes are brought together. Astroturf meets authentic lawn, freely interpreted gymnastics equipment turns into a herd of free roaming horses, and sequences of climbing-frames wind their way through the abstracted landscapes. Rosemarie Trockel is considered one of the most important German artists working today, and is known internationally for border crossing themes and genres. The work of Berlin landscape architects TOPOTEK 1 is characterized by a strategy that similarly defies categorization. Their cooperation has resulted in a project that bridges childlike memories and urban nature, complex structural engineering and the definite lightness of its landscape architecture.

Martin Rein-Cano was born in Buenos Aires in 1967. He studied art history at Frankfurt University and landscape architecture at the Technical Universities of Hannover and Karlsruhe. He trained in the office of Peter Walker and Martha Schwartz in San Francisco, and has worked with the office of Gabi Kiefer in Berlin. In 1996, the TOPOTEK 1 office was founded. Martin Rein-Cano has taught as a guest professor in Europe and North America. He has lectured internationally at a variety of universities and cultural institutions, and often serves as a member of design
competition juries. Lorenz Dexler was born in Darmstadt in 1968. He studied landscape architecture at Hannover Technical University. After working at the office of Prof. Günther Nagel, Hannover and Wehberg and at Eppinger Schmittke in Hamburg, he began his collaboration with TOPOTEK 1 in 1996. In 1999, Dexler became a managing partner at the studio. He has lectured at a diversity of schools and institutions, and frequently serves on international design juries.