The Green and The Gardens
The Vision
To create new green public space at the heart of CBC for all users: employees, patients and visitors.
Located to the west of Addenbrooke’s Hospital between the new Royal Papworth Hospital and Astrazeneca, The Green & The Gardens is a set of spaces for relaxation and calm, and to inspire thriving new relationships and ideas between current and future CBC organisations.
To achieve this, and in line with the campus’ ethos of exemplar collaboration, international concept artist, Ryan Gander, and leading landscape designer, Gillespies, were commissioned right at the start of the process to create this vision, and then develop the landscape design and all its features (routeways, planting, street furniture, lighting and sculpture) as one holistic public art and landscape commission.
Take me there
In Ryan’s own words
“If you think back through time, across England’s towns and villages there used to be common ground for all; a common place to walk around, and for personal and communal recreation.
My vision is to make the new public space reminiscent of that: a common ground for all, a level playing field for everyone to play on, a space for all CBC users to feel is theirs and to share together.
It is a vision for a green space at the heart of CBC that pulls England’s rural countryside into the campus. A vision to establish a strong natural landscape, rich in colour and biodiverse appeal, to act as a green open space resource for the overall campus, a pleasant outlook and green front door. Nature, intimacy, and human scale combine into one holistic space to discover, explore, wonder, relax, be alone and together; for private conversations and public events. An adventure playground for the mind.”
“[We have] made sculptural elements for the landscape, which consist of tents that are made of polyurethane resin – semi translucent so they’re brightly coloured in the day and light up an night. They look like real tents. By using these elements, they’re all sort of linked to the idea of recreation, or the idea of holiday and vacation, timeout, escapism. So it’s kind of using signifiers that adopt that language to make you think that you’re in a place where it’s all about spare time and freedom.”
Ryan Gander
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