The New Green Cross: A public condenser for social and ecological enhancement

The abundant public spaces in The Hague Zuid-West lack certain qualities in order to stimulate social cohesion and wellbeing in the district. These public spaces - well over the city’s average - are largely concentrated in a large central park called the Green Cross. The park is mainly used for sport activities and allotment gardens, and offers limited uses for the general public. The sport fields occupy 40% of the park while wetlands and forest area occupy merely 14% and 8% respectively, limiting biodiversity and carbon sequestration. Moreover, the park is divided by a motorway on which 15,000 vehicles pass each day, not an ideal situation… How to conciliate social progress, urban mobility and ecological enhancement? The assignment was to redesign the park by improving the circulation and ecological conditions while keeping the sport equipment and transport infrastructure in use for longer, enhancing the productivity of the existing resources. To do so, I adopted several guiding principles from “Landscape Ecology Principles in Landscape Architecture and Land-Use Planning” by Dramstad, Olson and Forman. The result is a new continuous landscape, under which several public functions are placed, such as the tram station, two sport halls, an art centre, an auditorium, a child care centre, a canteen. The landscape and building are conceived as a hyper-accessible public condenser.Public Condenser: The HagueArchitecture, Urbanism and Building Science