Green River
Archiprix 2004 - Best Dutch Graduation Projects
Before his residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in 2006, Ronald Rietveld graduated in 2004 as a landscape architect from the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture with the project Green River. This radical proposal — a bypass through the Dutch river landscape — emerged from the floods and evacuations of 1993 and 1995, which Ronald and Erik experienced firsthand within their family. Since 1989, Ronald had also been deeply involved, through his work as an ecological gardener, with environmental issues and the long-term consequences of climate change.
Green River is a landscape intervention that creates space for natural river processes and river floods hile simultaneously establishing a new urban front for the Arnhem–Nijmegen region. Roman settlements and old hamlets lie like atolls in this Green River.
Stretched between the area’s historic churches and castles, a 42-kilometre dike park forms the monumental framework of this newly articulated urban void.
Between 2000 and 2100, an urban front emerges along the dike park, with the green river as the central void between Arnhem and Nijmegen.
Green River connects the elements of the river landscape across all scales.