Landscape Architecture / Landschaftsarchitektur
Publisher: Edition Axel Menges GmbH
Published: 2017
Language: ger; eng
Number of pages: 127
ISBN-13: 9783869050034
Description: "If there is a plateau that continuously unites Hans Dieter Schaal’s numerous artistic fields of activity, a kind of fundamental level, then it is surely that of landscape architecture. Landscape motifs are as convincingly present in his stage sets as they are in his installations, his exhibition architectures, his texts, and, naturally, also his park and garden designs. Schaal has been on the track of the fascination of landscapes since the 1960s. For him, encountering the parterre or "carpet patterns" of the baroque Herrenhäuser Gärten in Hannover was a key experience. This was followed by an intensive study of the early landscape gardens of Great Britain, the park complexes of the Romantics and the Enlightenment in Weimar, Wörlitz, and Muskau, and by studies of the garden art ideas and philosophical implications that underpinned each of them. As a twice-over "Artist-in-Residence" at the Villa Massimo in Rome, Schaal was also able to absorb the whole cosmos of Italian garden and park planning, from the Renaissance to the present day. In 1978, Schaal published his first book, Wege und Wegräume (Paths and Passages), today considered a classic. Wege und Wegräume has become required reading and an artistic leitmotif for generations of landscape designers and architects. In 1994, a fourth Hans Dieter Schaal key work appeared entitled Neue Landschaftsarchitektur / New Landscape Architecture. It proved to be among the late 20th century’s most comprehensive studies of the topic of "landscape" in the wider sense. Above all, it prompts an existential subjective excursus into all those spheres that are inscribed into landscape beyond the professional mainstream. Schaal was subsequently able to build a large number of spectacular "follies" and installations in gardens and parks.

From 1998 to 2014, he was finally able to actually realise a whole city park, complete with artistic installations: the Wielandpark in Biberach. The complex architectonic and artistic layout of this park embodies, as it were, the distilled essence of decades of working with the bridle paths at the boundaries of landscape."--