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PATRICIA JOHANSON: ULSAN PARK, KOREA
Ulsan Park combines ecological restoration with art, culture, public infrastructure, recreation, and education. The challenge for this 912-acre site in Korea's leading industrial city was to create an island of sustainable nature while serving the needs of a million people. The Ulsan Park program required museums, playgrounds, shuttle-buses, and an Imax Theater, so my design needed to interweave major structures with restored ecosystems marsh, pond, intermittent creek, floodplain, meadows, upland forest using "art" to access and interpret nature. Because Koreans traditionally loved and worshipped nature, images for my design are based on animals, fish, and insects from Korea's myths, "Minhwa" folk tales, and living landscape. Thus cultural history is linked to ecological restorations within Ulsan Park, protecting and transmitting genetic information to the future.
One example: "Tiger Tail Plaza" surrounds a former concrete reservoir framed by skyscrapers. The engineering has been reconfigured to become a major wildlife area, with native vegetation as food and habitat for waterfowl, fish, and amphibians. The "reservoir" now reconnects to its natural drainage wet meadow and cattail marsh and tiger-stripe paths allow visitors to journey through shrubs, bulrushes, and marsh plants to open water where nesting-islands, waterfowl, and muskrats are seen. Tiger-paths move into a reforested valley, up the slopes of a mountain, and through a restored pine grove each filled with sculptural park-features and living communities.
A "Tiger-Paw" spillway incorporating bridge, seating, "Tiger-Claw" climbing structure, and ponds for flood control reconnects the renewed "reservoir" to its natural flow a stream cascading off the mountain and remnant floodplain. My educational program stresses the message of each animal here, the beloved tiger is extinct in Korea due to deforestation and habitat loss.
Ulsan City presses close to the edge of the concrete reservoir, where marsh vegetation will help clean the water by filtering out detritus.
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