Bustler featured the “Scent of Color,” New York-based painter Carmen Einfinger’s winning entry in an international design competition to transform Dolna Square, a city bus terminus in downtown Gdansk, Poland, into an outdoor gallery and green event space. Dolna Square will become an open space that incorporates a “bus stop, kiosk, a garden, benches, lampposts and trees be-decked with birdhouses, a fountain, and a serpentine walkway in lively colors and undulating, organic patterns.”
Inspired by the work of Gaudi (including Park Guell) in Barcelona, Nikki de Saint Phalle in Paris, and Hundertwasser in Vienna, the new space will highlight “sensuous color and form,” writes Bustler. Einfinger also pulls from youth and pop culture. Einfinger told Bustler: “There will be a feeling of harmony beauty and playfulness, which is central to my desire to create art. At first glance, the park may evoke graffiti, but upon closer inspection it will reveal a more orderly and primal way of scribbling and coloring to create a fanciful dream-like world, an imaginary city where diversity is a cause for hope and creative expression.”
The project also builds on Gdansk’s historical role in the rise of the Polish Solidarity movement and overthrow of Communism. The park is meant to highlight the way Gdansk residents have spurred community action and further support community development: [the project] “transforms the currently neglected and defunct Lower Town into a spatial experience of a crossroad—a moment of possibility that we can universally access through the unusual color combinations and the archetypal forms. I wanted to change this park into a creative force, turning loneliness and idleness into community action.”
Einfinger’s design, “The Scent of Color,” is expected to be completed in 2011.
Image credit: Carmen Einfinger
Looks a bit garish to me…