Landscape/Architecture: The Zwin

The Zwin was established in 1952; at the time, it was the first Flemish nature reserve. As part of the "experience", an educational bird park was added to the privately owned grounds in 1953, basically consisting of bird cages displaying a large number of indigenous species - I remember dimly having visited the site as a little kid. I always find being confronted with caged animals deeply unsettling, so thankfully, after being sold to the province of West Flanders in 2006, the bird park disappeared. The reserve itself, i.e. the Zwin plain, was purchased by the Agency for Nature and Forests of the Flemish Government. Branded as "the international bird airport", the park re-opened in 2016, boasting a completely new visitor area with a main building (reception area, permanent exhibition, panorama tower, ...), an outdoor track (the "cabin trail"), and an observation centre that borders the Zwin plain. The latter is actually an intertidal area, dominated by mudflats and salt marches, sustaining very specific fauna and flora. When walking among the different parts that make up the main building, one cannot look and remain indifferent. Designed by Coussée en Goris architecten, and GAFPA, office for architecture and urbanism, it feels too imposing for the polder landscape it inhabits. Too big, too rigid, too ... black. The wooden sidings, as a natural material, only go so far in tempering the perceived contrast and starkness, the latter also found inside the building. Unexpectedly however, when walking on the cabin trail bordering the mail complex, the anticipated clash between nature and culture is completely held off by what can only be described as a successful integration of the buildings into their surroundings - aided, to a large extent, by the bushes and trees along the cabin trail, visually containing and separating the visitor area from the plain itself. The images below have been ordered more or less according to how I moved around the site: the main building, the cabin trail, the observation building, one of the sign-posted walks on the plain, and finally, back to the main building via the entrance of the plain at the observation building. At the time of my visit, the weather was cloudy, windy and bleak, and most of the time, there was either no other soul around, or they were walking in the distance, barely perceptable. I tried to represent that feeling of bleakness and isolation by resisting the urge to up the contrast and saturation, so while the muted colors may not have that overly pleasing character, they are as realistic as possible. While I'm sure the grading of The Ghost Writer (Polanski, 2010) is quite different, my emotional perception of the plain and weather conditions was very similar to watching the scenes in and around the modernist villa by the sea.