Winners 2006 - Second Prize

Artist's Garden

The idyllic setting for this garden is the Limmat, a river reservoir in Wettingen, Switzerland. Years ago, the construction workers who built the dam lived in the small house on this site. The garden had originally served as a source of vegetables, and went wild as time passed. The wilderness has since been tamed and trimmed.

Today artefacts – seemingly functionless elements made of steel and concrete – populate the lawn in front of the lush backdrop of mature trees and shrubs. A round, rusting steel railing – a work by the artist who lives here – has no conventional task to fulfil, but marks instead an imaginary „secret garden“, a place which no one may enter.

The railing's burnt-sienna tone is in harmony with the square-shaped concrete wall-fragment, an eye-catcher from the kitchen, dining-room and terrace. Sandblasted dark grey concrete was chosen for a monolithic bench at the water's edge, anthracite-toned poured-in-place concrete for paths and terraces surrounding the house.