“The Garden” is a residential housing development in the heart of Berlin near the former inner-German border. Following the designated title of the development project, our design aims at fulfilling that promise and to create an actual garden for the forthcoming development. Underground parking infrastructure, provided an obstacle towards achieving a dense dissolving aesthetic of vegetation.

Taking the romantic garden as a conceptual starting point, the evolving cultivated wilderness alludes to a variety of classical garden elements but disperses them to a loose vegetation pattern of vividly growing bushes, shrubs and flowers combined with a pixel-like paving grid as an informal way-system connecting the green.

Sunken trees and a great variety of perennial species were inserted into the partly sunny and shady recesses of the dense building complex atop the underground parking enabling the garden to grow naturally. Cultivating the common form of the garden which acts as an antipode to the surrounding structural form, resulted in an updated contemporary layout. In this sense, the green structures form a self-confident counterpart to the formal and large-scale new edifices and constitute a dynamic reference point within the otherwise clean urban context.