Architecture as Landscape: 15 Terrain-Inspired Buildings

These skyscrapers, homes and city concepts eschew typical architectural silhouettes, taking inspiration from cliffs, mountains and hills to create artificial landscape features of their own. Whether attempting to blend into the surrounding landscape or rising defiantly from the flattest of environments, they seek a sense of harmony with the natural world.

Walkable Green Roofs on a Mountainous Mixed-Use Complex

The Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) is behind the vast majority of recent terrain-inspired architectural concepts, including this stunner commissioned by a Taipei developer. The mixed-use complex of housing, restaurants, cafes, pedestrian walkways, gardens and more features unparalleled vertical accessibility with walkable green roofs.

Glacier-Inspired Hungerburg Train Station by Zaha Hadid

Architect Zaha Hadid wanted her glacier-inspired design for the Hungerburg Train Station in Innsbruck to merge with its snow-covered surroundings in winter. The structure contrasts heavy concrete with light, airy, amorphous glass overhangs that seem to float.

Chaoyang Park Plaza by MAD Architecture

Gleaming like polished black basalt, the towering structures that make up MAD Architects’ Chaoyang Park Plaza explore the relationship between architecture and the natural landscape. The silhouettes are an interpretation of mountains and other shapes in classical Chinese paintings.

Wroclaw Mountain by Vicente Guallart/Guallart Architects

Guallart Architects designed this mountain-inspired structure to represent Wroclaw, Poland in the race to host the 2012 Olympic Games.

The Berg by Jakob Tigges

The skyline of Berlin would be dramatically altered if this wild vision by Jakob Tigges ever came to be. The Berg is a 1,000-meter mountain partially bounded by the Tempelhof Airport. While Tigges says the proposal is more symbolic than a serious idea, it’s meant to provoke thought about how architecture can be integrated with the land to provide natural habitats for wildlife and recreation space as well as places to live, shop and work.

Artificial Hill House

If there’s one defining feature of the Melbourne landscape, it’s that it’s so completely flat. Architect Andrew Maynard sought to create something entirely different with Hill House, an artificial landscape feature that perches a contemporary structure atop a grassy hill. Says Maynard, “If one is to explore the possibility of cantilevering off a cliff (a desire of many architects) one is forced to manufacture that landscape. A monolithic form is unsheathed from the hill and placed atop. A celebration of the synthetic, the manufactured. A simulacrum of both an undulating landscape and the pure architectural form.”

Towering Hills at the Gwanggyo Power Center by MVRDV

Greenery-covered nodules rise up from the landscape in this concept for an entire new city by MVRDV. The complex is envisioned as an acropolis of hilly structures containing residences, work, schools and play all in one interconnected structure. Each of the concentric rings contains hedges that improve ventilation and reduce energy usage.

Fake Hills Apartment Complex by MAD Archtiecture

The flat landscape of Beihai, China gets some new curves in the form of ‘Fake Hills,’ a monolithic apartment complex featuring an undulating roofline. Large openings in the structure maintain sunlight and views for the neighborhood behind it.

Block 39 by OFF Architecture

An artificial mountain capped with a dramatic gleaming roof takes its inspiration from past and present Serbia in this concept by Paris-based OFF Architecture. Block 39, a science center for Belgrade, includes trees planted into the facade of the building as well as artificial waterfalls to give visitors the sense that they’ve escaped the city altogether.

Mountain-Like Ski Slope Waste Incinerator

This unusual waste-to-energy plant by Bjarke Ingels Group doubles as a ski slope and recreation center with an angled, snow-covered roofline creating a path from the pinnacle to the ground below.

Cliff-Inspired ‘Mountain Dwellings’

BIG took inspiration from stepped cliffs to create a vision of the suburban future that preserves private outdoor spaces without the need for sprawl. ‘Mountain Dwellings’ is a terraced housing complex that gives each individual home access to sunlight, fresh air and views for ‘suburban living with urban density.’

Zira Island by BIG

Yet another concept by BIG takes the mountainous terrain inspiration even further with an entire island of artificial landscape forms. Zira Island was envisioned for the Caspian Sea in Azerbaijan, recreating the nation’s natural landscape in miniature with a series of entirely self-sufficient structures that create an ecosystem of their own using the latest in sustainable technologies.

Lace Hill by Forrest Fulton Architects

A complex multifunctional structure is concealed in Armenia’s Mount Ararat in this vision by the American Forrest Fulton architecture office. Mimicking its surroundings, the lace-like structure is covered in grass and perforated to allow for air flow, sunlight and observation of the historical landscape.

Green-Roofed Skyscraper by Graft Architects

The AO Project by Graft Lab is a high rise concept with a massive green roof that drapes down the side of the building to create an artificial hill.

Hilly California Academy of Sciences

The California Academy of Sciences blends beautifully into its hilly environment in San Francisco thanks to an undulating green roof measuring 2.5 acres. The building, designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, is covered in native plant species that don’t’ require extra maintenance or water.

  

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