The Floriade is a great ANWB outing, with more words than deeds

The sleek, modern facades are made of lime and hemp, painted pink with the root of the madder plant. A discarded ship’s mast has been sawn into planks for the inner walls, painted black with linseed oil, extracted from flax. The letters above the entrance are made of cane sugar and algae. The Voice of Urban Nature is the name of the pavilion that Overtreders W and a team of designers built for the Floriade in Almere, which was opened on Wednesday by King Willem-Alexander. The structure includes a series of open spaces with gardens, which show plant species in countless guises, from medicinal yarrow to isolating bulrush and edible herbs.

The designers have deliberately left the green roof out of the picture, so that insects and plants can go about their business undisturbed. It shows the new turn that the ten-yearly world horticultural exhibition is taking. Since 1960 the exhibition has revolved around looking at flowers and plants as aesthetic objects, this edition Growing Green Cities in Almere raises the question of what else plants can do for us, and vice versa, how ‘homo urbanus’ – in addition to reducing CO₂emissions – can contribute to nature development and biodiversity.

The idea that city and nature are not opposites, but part of the same ecosystem is not new; Over the past ten years, many biennials and world expos have focused on solutions to the climate crisis. This raises the question of how sustainable it is to set up a complete amusement park with a cable car for six months, with which the Floriade aims to attract two million visitors, of whom 70,000 are foreign tourists. The organization’s answer is that the exhibition pavilions will be reused or biodegradable, and the site will be further developed into a sustainable residential area, Hortus. But how ‘green’ is that legacy?

The plan with which Almere won the Floriade in 2012 was to build a revolutionary garden city, designed by the Rotterdam architectural firm MVRDV, which built, among other things, the Depot with a park roof at Museum Boijmans in Rotterdam and the green skyscraper Valley on Amsterdam’s Zuidas. As the basis for the district, architect Winy Maas devised a plan to plant a tree library, consisting of 2,500 trees, in alphabetical order, following the street grid.

The intention was to make buildings with these different tree species, from Abies (silver fir) to Ziziphus (Chinese date tree). On the artist’s impressions saw lush wooden towers, and a jasmine hotel. But the Amvest/Dura Vermeer project development team – the only party that registered for the tender – was not in the mood for experiments, and decided to build the first buildings ‘just’ with concrete.

The housing for the elderly, already occupied, is an unimaginative gray block. Residential tower Flores, which was to become the ‘Euromast’ of this Floriade and is now used for events, Maas has tried to save with a facade artwork. Instead of actual plants, photos of leaves and flowers from the arboretum have been printed on the glass facade. It’s an ironic icon that says: we have to build greener, but it didn’t work out well here.

And that while a little further on is the Natural Pavilion, the prototype that the government had developed for industrial wooden housing, schools and offices. In which a choice of bio-based design is on display, from seaweed inner walls to bell pepper stem chairs. It is therefore possible: beautiful, fast and sustainable construction, which complies with the rules of the Building Decree.

Good architecture starts with a good client, is a well-known statement by the former Flemish master builder Bob Van Reeth. Almere underestimated that role. Directors came and went, there has been (too) much poldering, whereby beautiful words have only been converted into deeds to a limited extent. For example, it is quite laughable to compare the enormous greenhouse, in which the latest innovations in horticulture are displayed, with the legendary Crystal Palace that was built in London in 1851 for the Great Exhibition (but unfortunately burned down).

The Floriade is a great ANWB outing, with its cable car, the Food Forum where cooking is done with local products, an open-air theater on the water and play areas for children. There are hobbit-like tiny houses and pavilions made of mushrooms, which were previously shown at the Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven. The new Museum M, designed by the young architect Alessandra Covini, is located on the central water square. The round art pavilion, with shells in the floors and tree trunk-shaped columns, which immerses you in nature projections and sounds, is one of the few wow moments of this Floriade.

Walking through the grounds you can see through your eye that this could become a special residential area, with its wealth of plants, a cycling route around the Weerwater, swimming spots and the (temporary) museum. The question now is whether the developers will take the ideas from the pavilions to heart and use them to continue building the city, or whether they will later, when the exhibition has been dismantled and composted, business as usual is. The latter is to be feared.