BIGyard garden courtyard, Berlin

Special Prize Living EnvironmentGerman Landscape Architecture Award 2013

Jury verdict: The BIGyard is a small courtyard that becomes BIG in use and effect through clever design. In the overdetermined residential environment - tension between privacy, need for quiet, pressure of use and maintenance - the project authors dare to play on an inherently small courtyard with a variety of themes. This usually leads to a situation in which, for all the good will, no design intention can be discerned. Not so in this case: a disciplined use of spatially effective elements such as loosely scattered gleditsia, raw tree trunks, and Buckminster Fuller-like tree houses creates a stable design framework within which a variety of qualities can playfully develop. A circular pathway creates informal zoning between areas close to the home and the more playful center, while also appearing to function as a racetrack. The ground level is further structured via upset and perennial cushions, spatially charging the courtyard and making it a garden courtyard.

The courage to plant and thereby also a commitment to a certain maintenance are to be explicitly praised here. The niche-like microstructure of the courtyard in interaction with the recessed loggias on the ground floor seems to be a successful answer to the need for spatial security within a courtyard that is easily visible. Through the combination of plants and artificial elements, the courtyard pleasantly stands out from the common "paradisiacal oasis" and invents a courtyard world that allows for different interpretations and different uses.

In the residential environment, whose tight corset of loudly postulated demands all too often leads to rudimentary designs, the BIGyard makes a commitment to a careful, detailed and innovative approach to the subject, which is often treated as a secondary issue by the profession.