A plan for a park in the centre of Amsterdam Zuidas

This plan for a park in the centre of Amsterdam Zuidas, the 'southern axis' development corridor, is inspired by Maarten Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp's book 'In search of new public domain' (NAi Publishers, 2001). I feel that in developing new metropolitan areas like Zuidas the ambition of everyone concerned must be to make these part of the 'public domain'. According to Hajer and Reijndorp, the core of this public domain is a space of encounter between religions, cultural backgrounds and behaviour, a place for confrontation and exchange between difference groups in the community. This requires not just space for consumption and a variety of stacked programmes but also places where individual citizens can determine their own identity in public space.

To put this ambition into practice, the existing plan for Amsterdam Zuidas was modified to make room for a park in the so-called Dock Zone at the heart of Zuidas. This way, the public space of Zuidas can become part of the public domain, investing Zuidas with meaning for the world citizen. The park will occupy the most accessed place in the Netherlands, where Amsterdam receives and meets the world - literally so, because of the high-speed train (HSL) station and with Schiphol close by, and because it lies directly along Amsterdam's radial roads. This places the new 'Zuiderpark' in illustrious company. After all, Vondelpark, Sarphatipark, Oosterpark and Westerpark owe much of their success to their position on the radial routes.

The ground plane of Zuiderpark is draped across the volume of the required station-related programme. In other words, the park sits atop stations for the HSL, metro and buses as well as a large parking facility. The folds and curves of the ground plane introduce the time-honoured medium of illusion into contemporary park design. Not just landscape illusion but explicitly park illusion. The park proves to be a building with an audacious, poetic and scenic ground plane. And the more dramatic the relief, the more generous the station spaces below.

The park programme is held in a fanciful diagonal structure to counter the surrounding corporate high-tech architecture. Zuiderpark is to be enriched by such happenings as the sensational flowering of hundreds of magnolias as a spring fiesta for the entire city. Specific groups such as the elderly, skaters, joggers, young people, urban ecologists and toddlers have an object on offer that they can appropriate. These are, respectively, a 178-metre-long bench where you can either sit or (if a skater) grind, an arduous jogging circuit with a suspended bridge and 589 steps, a bare 'rock' that makes a nice warm hangout spot, bat caves, rare microhabitats and a sandpit.

The design allies itself with the tradition and great sense of space of the landscape style and illusory qualities of the Parc des Buttes Chaumont. It focuses attention on spatial perception, manipulating the horizon and expanding and contracting space. It seeks an intensifying of perspectives, encounters and experiences. The need for an urban park is as relevant as ever and calls for innovation and guts. This final-year project, therefore, is a proposal to reposition urban park design.

Place of education: AvB Amsterdam Specialization: landscape architecture | Tutors: Bram Breedveld, Ton Schaap, Michael van Gessel