The Barcelona Botanic Garden extends along the upper side of the Montjuïc mountain that overlooks Barcelona, and holds spectacular views over the city.
It is a garden where plant species from areas of the world with a Mediterranean climate live together, sorted by geographical area. Therefore, the species found there adapt quite well to the city and can be exhibited outdoors.
The garden is created by accommodating a geometry of paths that cross each other forming triangles (you can clearly distinguish a main circuit that makes the visit very easy) adapted in a very natural way to an uneven slope. This powerful geometric order served the architects to organise the entrance park, and will be replaced, over time (already happening in some areas of the park) by a vegetal order that is the result of an intelligent planting of undergrowth, bushes and trees that will grow over time and give the whole set a natural order as logical as the artificial one. The two currently coexist perfectly in various areas of the park.
The palette of artificial materials is basic: wooden fences, rusted iron and concrete. The auxiliary buildings are also built with these materials. The beautiful high school that crowns the park should be highlighted, a prism that levitates a few metres from the ground and that leaves a rusty iron window as a privileged vantage point of the city.
The complex constitutes one of the most beautiful urban spaces in the city, and the multiplicity of routes created by its geometry of paths makes it a very pleasant place for a long stay.
The Botanical Garden is built on an area of about 14 hectares on the Montjuïc mountain, in front of the Olympic Ring, on land that for the last hundred years was a dumping ground for all kinds of waste.
For this reason, funds were requested from the European Community to recycle this old landfill and turn it into the new Botanical Garden of Barcelona.
The project is carried out entirely with strict criteria of sustainability and elimination of physical barriers.
To build the new topography, the reinforced earth of the mountain itself is used, recyclable and ecological materials are used for the fence, etc. An integral irrigation system that from the central computer activates the different electro-valves through a radio transmitter, assisted by photovoltaic energy also by the lighting of the emergency lighting.
Obviously, all the planting criteria, by grouping plants from areas with similar climates, are also carried out in a sustainable way by bringing together the homoclimatic Mediterranean flora, California, Chile, South Africa, Australia and our eastern and western Mediterraneans.
The layout of the garden is based on botanical issues of ecosystems, using the concept of morphological convergence. The aim is to turn it into a tool of great scientific, pedagogical and leisure value.
The method adopted, which in a certain way can be described as ultra-artificial, ends up assuming the fractal dimension of nature itself, achieving a synthesis between the ecological balance of the plantations and the artificiality that the built infrastructure gives to the territory.
The logical intervention occurs without scale.
The final dimension of the interventions is unrelated to the project mechanisms, the initial layout and measurement are not necessary to deepen the project. It will be the use of the triangular mesh that will be faceting and fractalising the landscape while solving the complex demands of the project, drainage, circulation, irrigation...
This will be the place itself, the one that provides the guidelines for the intervention, making its morphological and topographical conditions emerge and the forms of the new landscape.