Jardí Botànic de Barcelona
Case study
Jardí Botànic de Barcelona (JBB)
Project data
Project name: Jardí Botànic de Barcelona
Location: Barcelona
Date completed: 1999 – under plantation
Cost: €6.061.206 euros. €50.50 euros/m^2
Maintenance: €360.000 euros/year
Area: 14ha (12 constructed)
Botanical consultants: Dr Joan Pedrola, botanist, Dr Josep M. Montserrat, botanist
Designers: Carlos Ferrater, architect, Bet Figueras, landscape architect,
Jose Luis Canosa, architect
Works direction: Carlos Ferrater, architect
Construction management: Fernando Benedicto, technical architect
Planting plan scheme: Artur Bossy, horticultural specialist
Post-inauguration plantings: Núria Membrives, botanist
Garden technical coordinator: Jaume Pàmies, agronomist
Client: Ajuntament de Barcelona
Overview
Barcelona’s new Botanical Garden (JBB) is a happy example of the best of that city’s school of public
space design. Yet it has some features that make the project stand out from others: a newish approach
to planting, which escapes from drawing-board exercises and incorporates ecological criteria such as
phytosociology and morphologic evolutionary convergence; a special sensitivity in working with the
site’s topography; a clever infrastructure layout that allows the project to grow in a very flexible and
creative way, while keeping it coherent as a whole; a Spartan detailing that establishes a strong ten-
sion with the growing vegetation; and finally, a richness in perceptions of scale.
Paradoxically, the Jardí Botànic de Barcelona looks more like a landscape than a garden. Lyrical garden
vocabulary has been replaced here by a sort of extensive, ever-changing vegetal texture, which creates a
subtle tension with the elements of static infrastructure. For the future, one visualises it as a sort of chang-
ingmachia landscape, as if taken from an Impressionist painting.
‘All the Mediterranean in the world’ is the motto of the new Botanical Garden of Barcelona. It displays the
vegetation found in those regions of the world with Mediterranean climates: the Mediterranean basin,
southern Australia, California, central Chile and the tip of South Africa. Opened in 1999, on the basis of an
initial planting, it is currently at the development stage.
JBB introduces an innovative approach to botanical gardens; instead of presenting its plant collection by taxo-
nomical order, it does so by rendering diverse vegetal landscapes from Mediterranean climatic regions world-
wide. Plants are distributed according to their place of origin and are grouped by ecological affinity into 71
phytoepisodes, or artificial reconstructions of the plant communities characteristic of particular landscapes.