Garden.Eden.Church . Hannover

Conception and realisation of the main project of the "Garden Region Hannover - 2009" for the Garten.Eden.Kirche (with Anne Nissen - visual artist . Hannover).

A luminous cocoon in the palm forest

During the Garden Year 2009 of the Garden Region Hannover, a very special garden art exhibition can be seen in the Christuskirche in Nordstadt: the Garden.Eden.Church.

From Easter Sunday to Thanksgiving, the imposing church interior will become a lushly planted Garden of Eden. The Hanoverian open space architecture office Grün plan and the artist Anne Nissen won the competition announced by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in March 2008. Construction work began in early February 2009, and on Easter Sunday the project was ceremoniously opened with a festive service; more than 20,000 visitors saw the exhibition in just the first two months.

In the center of the Garden.Eden.Church stands an eight-meter-high, semi-transparent "cocoon" covered with delicate gauze, woven from a filigree aluminum tube mesh - a quiet and contemplative space within space, which plays around the mighty columns of the darkened nave and depicts slowly changing light projections on its surface. A place of paradisiacal silence that glows and whose interior shines through vaguely to the outside. Only an old, natural stone-framed olive tree and the water basin symbolizing the source of life, illuminated with images of people, are located in this space of transformation, filled with white quartz sand.

On the model, the form and structure for the "cocoon" was found transferred to CAD, and statically calculated. Foot points and pipe connections were developed in detail. A total of 680 meters of pipe was calculated, pre-bent, located and installed by our project team by hand arch by arch in the church interior. The artist sewed 1 000 square meters of gauze, which was stretched as a transparent cover on the "cocoon".

A lush planting surrounds the interior - palms up to 7 meters high, huge strelizias, large-leaved banana perennials and fine-woody kentias with a dense, diverse underplanting. Orchid and calla blossoms glow in the semi-darkness. Film sequences are projected into four steel basins filled with CO2 fog, symbolizing the streams of paradise. The fog magically shines through the surrounding greenery.
60 large potted plants were leased from the Freiburg city nursery for the exhibition period, and a further 1,200 plants were planted by the landscape architects themselves. At night the plants get their assimilation light, during the day the video projections and discreet light spots let the paradise garden glow atmospherically.