Natural History Museum Park

The site of the park exemplifies the Swiss landscape paradox where, infrastructure, suburbs and bucolic idyll are densely interwoven. And such was the challenge: how to design a park which inspires contemplation about natural history which is ironically located atop a motorway tunnel, surrounded by sports fields, multifamily housing and a major traffic artery? At a time when concepts like nature or landscape no longer possess a clear meaning, the park explores the theme of artificial naturalness/natural artificiality.

An atmospheric frame and backdrop of hornbeam trees and messy lush groundcover filter out the loud heterogeneous context, allowing visitors to mentally immerse themselves in the park and its play on themes of nature. Embedded in this atmospheric backdrop, enormous concrete “stepping stones” bearing poetic and scientific messages function as both path and exhibition. Strewn about the park, these fragments act as catalysts for our curiosity and imagination. Quotes and scientific geological terms of local geological relevance are chiselled out of the concrete slabs in 30 cm-high lettering, alongside fossils and massive boulders deposited by glaciers. Unlike the linear pedagogical approach inside of the museum, the park provides clues with which to ponder and experience the seemingly endless spans of time and transformational processes of natural history.

The use of the two most significant regional stones express the relation between nature and mankind. The all present regional conglomerate, Nagelfluh, is identical in make-up to man-made concrete. The concrete pavers express both their relation to the natural Nagelfluh and the material’s ability to be formed by man, the surfaces appearing in all forms from roughly hammered, raw and natural to artificially imprinted.

The beautiful green tinted sandstone is equally all-present in cultural, historical buildings. The ground plane of the entire park is made of the stone a raw natural sandstone gravel while beautifully sculpted cultural artefacts of the same stone are strewn about.

The three most significant geological eras of Eastern Switzerland are expressed in the park, encapsulating the vast dimensions of geological history in a small, memorable story. The fact that St. Gallen was once a tropical ocean is implied by such texts as “Bahamas”, bald cypresses and dinosaur fossils. Huge colourful boulders allude to the Ice Age glaciers that transported them to the region made up of only beige and grey stones.

The park stretches between the museum and the parish church of St. Maria Neudorf, which asked that the landscape design incorporate a dialogue on the two theories of the world’s creation, religious and scientific. Three quotes chiselled into the concrete from the Bible, Max Plank and Charles Darwin play on this theme.

Vegetation also becomes a means to contemplate upon the park’s play on themes of nature. The predominantly indigenous plants are interspersed with non-native hydrangeas as a reflection of the parks paradoxical location. Ginkgo and larch trees in front of the museum façade embody a riddle of nature. The world’s oldest tree, ginkgo has delicate, fan-shaped leaves but is classified as a conifer. By contrast, larch is likewise a conifer, but loses its needles in winter. The two tree species share the vibrant neon green of their foliage in spring and the resplendent yellow hues in autumn.