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ONL has built a reputation to make buildings as large sculptures. Art and architecture have successfully fused together into a new kind of building, based on the file to factory process of mass-customization. Internationally their best known buildings like the Garbagetransferstation, the Saltwaterpavilion and The Web of North-Holland are resting gently on the landscape. By looking like friendly alien spaceships the ONL buildings respect the existing landscape where they have landed, they communicate with it, and they rather are reinforcing the existing quality of the landscapes then colonizing it. The alien building bodies of ONL are placed like streamlined rolling stones sculpted by natural forces and lifted on top of the landscape. Always they have a strong relation with the surrounding landscape, in a physical way by absorbing the essence of their context, and in a virtual way by establishing direct digital links to data extracted from the surroundings.

ONL landscape design strategy # 1: Soft Landing. The Garbagetransferstation is designed as an integral part of a larger concept for the Landscape of the 21st Century. The main thought behind the concept is that the treatment of garbage must be seen as a positive sign of civilization. To treat waste well needs collective effort, individual invention and creativity in finding cultural solutions how to take advantage from the existence and treatment of garbage. The large curved building body can be seen as a waste processing device with intelligent head, large half open trunk, and a tail part where the purification process takes place in order to send the treated water back to the city. The Garbagetransferstation is a modest team player in a rural landscape which is transformed by the presence of a large waste mountain. The curved building body has seemingly made a soft landing on  the prepared building site. The design of the Garbagetransferstation represents ONL landscape design strategy # 1: The alien building body makes a soft landing. The landing is preceded by setting up communication between the virtual 3d model and the existing site. The evolving 3d model is informed by data extracted from the site.

ONL landscape design strategy # 2: Absorbing information in real time. The Waterpavilion is a sculpture building which rests as a giant stranded black whale [with sweeping silver tail] on the rocky shores of the artificial island of Neeltje Jans. The climate here is the most harsh climates as can be seen and experienced in the Netherlands. That is why ONL chose to design such a robust body for the Waterpavilion. The Waterpavilion is solid as a rock. But the interior is colourful, dynamic with changing lights and sounds, connected in real time to a weather station outside on the sea. The sea and the rocky shores are the larger context where the building body has become part of. The Waterpavilion has adopted a life form which adopts well to the specific conditions of the site. The design of the Waterpavilion represents ONL landscape design strategy # 2: The building body absorbs information in real time from data extracted from the surroundings. The building body has become an information processing vehicle, absorbing, digesting and propagating information, transforming information from one disguise into the other.

ONL landscape design strategy # 3: Crystallization of the Landscape. The design for the Polynuclear Landscape is based on a series of  landscape design concepts, which can be applied together or as separate strategies. The Polynuclear Landscape is created by the displacement of the supposedly flexible surface of the earth by an intuitive sketch. The sketch has a  polynuclear nature, which is directly translated into the multitude of nuclei of the new inhabited parkcity. The displacement map describes hills and valleys following the trajectories of the sketch. By developing in time, the displaced surface of the otherwise flat dutch polderlandscape starts building up a conversation with the 320 lots of land, constituting a dynamic database. The development brings about differentiation of the building lots into a wild variety of uses and colours. The inhabitation of the Polynuclear Landscape starts from the top down. The highest tops of the hills starts the crystallizing process first. The earth of the top of the hills is substituted by a built volume, but in the same overall shape as the hills themselves. This represents the ONL landscape design strategy # 3: Substitute land by building body, without changing the overall shape and volume of the land. This crystallization process is a very powerful strategy. You literally build the landscape. Architecture and landscape design become synonymous. Just like ONL has stated back in 1994 that “A building is a sculpture, and a sculpture is a building”, ONL claims four years later in 1998 that “The building is the landscape, the landscape is the building”.Building from top down, from the top of the hill down to the lakes implies that in the intended development of 25 years the potential for built volume increases dramatically with the years. Exactly opposite to traditional planning where building from ground up for some years inevitably leads to an upper limit of built volume.

ONL landscape design strategy # 4: Attractors in the landscape. The Attractor Game as designed by ONL for the development of an suburban area of 1500 homes brings together the fuzziness of conceptual design desires with the simultaneous creation of exact data. The designer / player of the Attractor Game selects from the interface a number of [12] attractor and drags them into the map of the urban area. activating a placed attractor means attracting a number of vague dots placed randomly around the center of attraction. For each attractor values can be chosen by using sliders, one for the strength of the attractor and another for the range of the attractor. Negative values can be chosen too, then the attractor becomes a distractor, pushing away the fuzzy blots. The designer / player attaches meaning to the colours of the blots, for example blue for water, green for trees, red for homes etcetera. After having placed the series of attractors and having the parametric values for the strength and the range, the image is scanned by the Attractor Game and evaluated into an array of Autocad blocks, whereby the spacing between the blocks is directly related to the colour density of the fuzzy overlapping dots. The blocks can be after your own design replaced by 3d elements like trees, volume of water, houses. Thus a 3d model of the suburban landscape design is created, which links the fuzziness of the brushstroke to the exact data of the blocks. The Attractor Game is based on the ONL landscape design strategy # 4: Place attractors in the landscape and link their visual representation to exact number in a database. In this way intuition and logic are developed hand in hand. The emotion of the designer is no longer blocked by the ratio of her / his mind.

ONL landscape design strategy # 5: The Parametric Landscape. In the Zujiajiao Canal Town project ONL developed the technique of parametric design both for the arrangement of houses and apartment blocks along the streets and for the extreme variety of the houses themselves. The Attractor strategy has been used for shaping the street grid. The size of the street grid pattern is variable according to parametric values which can be set by a collaborating group of urban planners, traffic consultants, project developers and landscape designers. Parametric design forms the open source basis for Collaborative Design & Engineering. And if we play the parametric design game in real time, we might describe the design process as Collaborative Design & Engineering in Real Time. Parametric design techniques are applied for the arrangement of the building blocks along the shaped street pattern. The parametric values include mutual distance, distance to the street, size of the blocks, height of blocks etc. After the building blocks are placed, each building block is specified using another parametric design tool. Here ONL has developed a system where the overall sizes can be chosen, but also the basic shapes for the walls and the roofs. The result of this unique parametric planning method is that in the end not a single house is the same. The Zujiajiao Canal Town  has no repetition, each house is unique in its urban setting and in its appearance. The process of mass-customization is applied to both landscape design and architecture.

Combinations of ONL landscape design strategies. In fact all recent landscape and urban planning projects by ONL are combinations and evolutionary versions of the above described strategies, and in each project some new attitude pops up as well. For example in the Helsinki Music Center competition project ONL combined the Crystallization strategy with the Soft Landing strategy. The 10m thick layer of soft earth on top of the hard bedrock underneath has been transmogrified into a building volume of 200.000m2. Canyons cut through the layer of crystallized earth, and the surface of the earth is often substituted by large undulating glass covers. This building is extremely low energy consuming, and offers a very safe place to exercise and listen to music. On top of the new surface ONL has placed as the icon sculpture-building a large spaceship-like volume which contains the large concert hall. All projects by ONL are combinations, recombinations, variations and new versions of the above presented 5 landscape design strategies.

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