De Borght park restoration

Working with what decades of low maintenance made

2024 - ongoing
Mechelen - BE
City of Mechelen

Area: 4ha
Program: Historical landscape park, ecological redesign
Team: Ossart & Maurière (lead)
Status: Built-ongoing

The park sits within Mechelen's urban fabric, carrying layers of landscape history across its topography, its planting, and its soil. Working with a site of this kind involves holding two imperatives in productive tension: the heritage of the existing spatial structure (its sequence, its mature trees, its relationship between open and enclosed) and the ecological potential of what the site has become in the meantime, including in zones that developed more freely throughout decades of low maintenance.

The working method begins with a slow and detailed reading: soil, vegetation & historical surveys, planting inventories, observation of how different parts of the park.

The emerging design strategy works through selective reinforcement rather than wholesale redesign: interventions allow ecological succession to continue where it is already producing spatial and biological value, infrastructure are upgraded, pockets of uses are introduced to frame the architectural, landscape and botanical heritage, in a productive dialogue.

Note : the pictures below are depicting the existing situation, more will come soon !

A snapshot of the existing situation

Decades of low maintenance have allowed nature to slowly reclaim the formal elements of the park: a wild poetry that becomes the starting material for the redesign.

The ruin vocabulary of the central island will be conserved as a romantic gesture

The dense self-seeded afforestation of certain areas is blurring the lines of the original park. While these biotopes have high natural value, they clash with the cultural elements of the historic layout. Their managed substitution addresses the ecological ambitions of the future spaces, advocating for a balanced and productive dialogue between natural succession and cultural use.

The slow filling of the castle moat by the vegetation

The main entrance path framed by two rows of Metasequoias is one of the most distinctive features of the site. Opening the park to the public raises the question of accessibility: most paths require restoration, and the method of intervention will need to minimise construction impact (in terms of process and foundation loads) on the existing root systems of the mature trees.