European Landscape Architecture: Best Practice in Detailing

France

Design philosophy

The aim was to integrate the service station into

the surrounding countryside, a landscape where

the fields appear boundless and where the view

stretches to the horizon. The characteristic land-

scapes of the Department of Somme are those

of the Bay of Somme delta and the fields of the

Plateau of Picardie. These landscapes with their

canals, wetlands and open fields have been com-

bined in the design of the park.

You enter the site from the south and are led into

the landscape, away from the motorway, by a road

concealed by slopes. You successively discover the

parking area and the building that divides the motor-

way world from the wide-open landscape on the

other side. By first emerging in this way, through

the slopes, the feeling of freedom when entering

the park is enhanced.

In excess of 200,000m^3 of earth, excavated during

construction of the motorway, was to became the

new landscape of the Bay of Somme motorway

services. The winning project proposed to cover the

whole site with a 2–2.5m-thick layer of earth and

then to create canals and wetlands within this layer.

When one visits the site today, the extra layer of

earth is barely visible. To facilitate the understanding

of these comprehensive earthworks, a model was

placed in the administration building on the site dur-

ing construction.

It was important for the HYL office to visualise

the terrain of the project using models during the

design process. A lot of effort was put into solving

the problems, step by step, that were associated

with the levels. Modelling also proved to be a use-

ful tool when seeking to insert the proposal into

the surrounding landscape, a fundamental aspect

of the HYL design philosophy. Through the terrain

3.2

Aerial photograph showing the special landscape of

the Bay of Somme

3.3
Park and surrounding countryside with path reach-
ing out into the landscape