The modern hanging gardens
In the desert outside Riyadh, a stunning new project aims to present 400 million years of botanical history, reports Kate Riordan
Gently swaying palms as tall as houses, the soothing burble and rush of fountains and waterfalls, exotic carpets of rainbow-hued blooms. This might sound like the long-lost Hanging Gardens of Babylon, destroyed by an earthquake two thousand years ago; in fact, it’s how the King Abdullah International Gardens (KAIG) might look on completion in 2011.
Intended to honour Saudi Arabia’s monarch, the architects, engineers and botanists behind its design hope it will also be a place of education and pleasure for the thousands expected to visit. As they say themselves, the gardens will be “a gift to a king, but a greater gift to mankind.”
The team behind the winning design is London-based architecture firm Barton Willmore, which has also called on the expertise of the UK’s Natural History Museum and the Eden Project, based in Cornwall. What will make these botanical gardens stand out from their predecessors around the world – and one of the main reasons the firm won the contract – is that KAIG, as master-planner Nick Sweet puts it, “will tell the story of time.” Where other gardens recreate contemporary botany around the world – a pocket of Brazilian rainforest or an English box-hedge maze – Sweet and his fellow planners have taken a chronological rather than geographical approach.
The surrounding desert is an appropriate backdrop to the story of our planet; once upon a time, this hostile, arid landscape was verdant, lush and rain-saturated. KAIG’s earliest garden will recreate the Devonian period, taking visitors back some 400 million years to a strange landscape of geysers, volcanoes and brightly coloured mosses and lichens. Each period is reassembled as a world in miniature, from the Carboniferous to the Jurassic, albeit minus the dinosaurs; the Cretaceous, when the first flowers bloomed; and through the Cenozoic era, which saw the rise of the grasses, and which includes the Pliocene epoch, viewed now as an “ideal” environment of woodland and rivers.
For the present day, designers have planned a “Garden of Choices,” to show what mankind might have to live with if climate change is allowed to continue unchecked. Here, the garden will be split in two: on one side, what the world will look like if we do nothing; on the other if we act. In the former, visitors will be able to see the result of escalating CO2 levels: increased desertification (the desert beyond the gardens underlines this point), and rising sea levels.
The Paleobotanic Building will form the main structure, linking the biospheres needed to protect many of the plants, as well as house the main exhibits, a host of restaurants, an amphitheatre and a 1.3km promenade. Resembling a pair of giant crescent moons, a traditional Islamic symbol, the interlocking structures are topped with masts which will rise above the desert skyline. Enclosed and obscured by the curves of the moons, to maintain a sense of intrigue, will be the Wadi Garden, which celebrates the existing, local ecosystem. Beyond is the rest of the 160-hectare site, which will feature an aviary, butterfly garden and water gardens.
The protective biospheres will form the key element of the Paleobotanic Building. The domes will be covered with an innovative translucent plastic called ethyltetrafluoroethylene (ETFE). Three layers of this will act as a cushion to conserve heat when it’s cold and keep the air cool when the desert sun beats down.
Given the overall theme of the gardens, the project must be sustainable. It will use solar and wind power and 90 percent of the building stone, gravel and rocks will be quarried on site. Electric buses will trundle the 20-minute journey to and from the city centre via the main hotels, to encourage the use of public transport. As for water, “we don’t want to be profligate with it,” says Sweet. “So we won’t have big exposed areas of water which will evaporate, and we’ll reuse water, for irrigation purposes, up to six times.” Keeping the air temperature constant in the domes might have proved a problem in a country where the mercury regularly rises to 55°C, but the solution is simple, and relies on the principle that heat rises. The tallest dome will be a massive 45 metres high, so it can maintain a comfortable temperature for visitors and the more fragile plants near the bottom, while hardier species can rise high up into the hotter air.
“The real challenge is not the physical buildings but cultivating thousands of plants,” says Sweet. “They will come from all over the world – for instance, there’s a place in Cornwall which grows a specific type of Jurassic tree fern. Of course, it’s one thing having small saplings – we’re going to need 10-metre tall trees.” Nevertheless, some plants will be grown from seeds and tiny cuttings, many of them sourced from seed banks (depositories for every plant species known). One of these banks is kept under the North Polar ice-cap, where the below-freezing temperatures stop the seeds from germinating. The intense dryness of the desert means there will eventually be a comprehensive seed bank at KAIG too.
Poignantly, some species cannot be represented in their relevant era because they have become extinct. Our only clue to their existence is found in fossils but these can only tell botanists so much – structure and size, for instance; the rest, such as colour or texture, would be guesswork. The solution at KAIG will be to represent them as artificial and translucent “ghost” plants that will be threaded among the living species. Not only does this get around the problem of authenticity, it also starkly demonstrates the cost of extinction. This is vital in a time when studies show that if all conservation efforts were frozen now, by 2030 we would have lost or committed to early extinction a fifth of the planet’s plants and animals. “A key part of the story is to create a sense of loss,” says Sweet.
While the gardens will be an educational tool, Sweet stresses that there won’t be any imposed preciousness or pomposity. Entry will not be free – as he explains, people respect a place they have to pay to get into – but he wants it to be somewhere people go to relax and socialise too. “I want people to be able to have a laugh and chuck a Frisbee about,” he says.
The mayor of Riyadh and its head of parks, Dr Aldjain, under whose jurisdiction the gardens will be, have proved a driving force for the scheme. They have helped generate a genuine excitement in the city, where businesses recognise that Riyadh hasn’t yet consolidated its position as a cultural tourist destination, and have therefore been happy to donate generous sums of money towards the US$300m budget. As Sweet says, “there is a long-established tradition in Arab countries like Saudi Arabia of celebrating gardens and water.” The King Abdullah International Gardens should prove to be a spectacular example.
BARTON WILLMORE
This multidisciplinary practice (above, urban design director Nick Sweet) was founded more than 70 years ago and has eight offices across the UK. Current projects include Honda UK’s British headquarters in Slough, and an all-weather track for the famous Newmarket racecourse. They’re also behind a controversial 50-storey residential building on the south bank of the Thames in London – Vauxhall Tower – which, if given the go-ahead, would be the tallest residential building in Europe, and an unmissable addition to the city’s skyline. www.bartonwill. more.co.uk
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