Rolling mill, farriery, ironworks – about 200 years ago, in Eberswalde by the Finow canal, the industrialization of Brandenburg began. Today, tapes of steel run through the terrain, making the transformation of an early industrial area into a landscape park. In just three years the 17 hectares of a former industrial site have been converted into an innovative park. In 2002, TOPOTEK1 took the occasion of the park’s inauguration to mark their professional surfacing with an exhibition of their work.

The exhibition was – not shyly – designed ti be about “Thinking and Working”, displaying as much the finished projects, as the process of realizing them. On-site photos from construction met the translocation of a large table from the office, complete with computers and authentic reading material for inspiration. Also, explicitly dealing with the challenge of the gallery’s space, a 1:1 scale photograph from the finished Eberswalde Park was on display and could be perused sitting on a long orange bench – the same one as in Eberswalde, along Finow Canal. The thin film of transition between inside and outside space was conceptually enhanced by a diorama of hundreds of middle format slide photographs on the gallery’s windows to be seen from either side.

Several other competition projects showed the creative potential of Martin Rein-Cano and Lorenz Dexler as the exhibition was to signalize a fresh spirit in understanding landscape architecture as an encompassing, cultural activity. One of the first exhibitions of landscape architecture at the prestiius Berlin architecture gallery Aedes, “Thinking and Working” claimed a renewed questioning of nature and a new way of approaching landscape design.