Jardí Botànic de Barcelona
Design development
The design can best be described in terms of themes
rather than zones.
Spatial strategy and earthmodelling
The goal is to exploit the natural distribution
of vegetation, the mosaic using the grid as
a spatial strategy for allocating the different
Mediterranean landscapes of the world.
(Dr Joan Pedrola, botanist, 1989)
At the beginning of the design process, it was
essential to find a flexible spatial strategy that
would allow the botanical collections to be distri-
buted, while making them accessible. The strategy
would also provide a basic matrix for all the different
professionals involved to work together.
Initially, the project team started working with the
classical square or regular grid that most of the
world’s historical botanical gardens have traditio-
nally used to organise their collections, but, as a
result of the site’s complicated topography and
steep slopes, this geometry would have generated
huge earthworks and made the project unviable.
After some research, an irregular triangulated net-
work, as used by surveyors to generate digital ter-
rain models, was adopted as a device to generate a
grid which could be used to divide the garden into
parcels of land and to plan the path network. The
triangulated grid also came closer to natural mosaic
patterns, another objective of the designers.This irregular triangulated network was adapted to
the contours of the terrain, in such a way that each
triangle had two vertices at the same height and
an area that varied with the slope, minimising the
earth modelling. The triangle is the polygon that has
more perimeter per unit of surface, therefore it is
the polygon that provides the best visual accessibi-
lity. The result is an abstract grid that clings to the
topography like a fishnet stocking.In some places, the continuity of the terrain was
then fractured by modifying the heights of some of
the vertices of the underlying triangulation system.
This resulted in flattened triangular shapes sur-
rounded by concave or convex retaining walls that
contained the land cut or the landfill respectively.
These places were planned to be strategic resting
points, belvederes and didactic nodes within the
path network. At the same time, these artifici-
ally created topographical irregularities enrich the
garden’s climatic variability in terms of sun and
shade exposure and wind shelter, and thus enhance
opportunities for the establishment of different
plant communities.The underlying grid guides a hierarchical path system
that carries the drainage and irrigation networks.