Office

The tillage of the soil and natural elements gives a very special value to the time in the project: where one necessarily works by phases in the urban project, the landscape extends this data by taking it infinitely beyond the limits of the time of urbanization. Much more than designing a landscape delivered at a given time, we must give it the foundation of conditions that will allow it to develop. This also applies to the attention paid to uses on public space: thinking through uses implies not to «overload» space through programming, but rather to give everyone the means to flourish and evolve in public space short, medium and long term. 

But also, and even before the project takes place, the prefiguration, the «zero landscape» (Michel Desvigne) can begin to transform the gaze on a place. In the search for a measured intervention on the landscape, we systematically try to change in advance the views on the place to transform its uses, before seeking to modify its structure. 

However, to reveal is not to project, and we think that we should not fall into the reverse excess by operating only partially on certain landscapes: depending on the stakes, It is important to study the impact of the intervention on a case-by-case basis, looking at the historical trajectory of the site and its future planning. 

“I firmly believe, I admit, that the value of history depends on what it teaches us about the future.” Jackson, J.B. (2003), A la découverte du paysage vernaculaire, Arles: Actes Sud (1st ed. In the United States in 1984) (p. 42)

Whatever its scale, the site, the plot, the urban entity, is necessarily the starting point and landing point of the project. We find a special attachment to projects that allow us to transcend scales: where a small-scale site allows us to “see far” and “do great”, or, on the contrary, when we think about the habitability of places and infrastructures that have not been designed for domestic scale. 

The routes, whether they are linked to the passage of wildlife in a bio-corridor, to cyclists in a cycling plane, or to the pendulous flows of a road infrastructure, are the objects and means of links (or breaks) between local and territorial scales. 

This work of links and places, begun with David Mangin on the former airport of St-Exupéry in Toulouse Montaudran has led us to consider the routes as links but also places around which spaces are organized. At the urban scale, we question the principle of construction based as much on the design of places connected by paths as on the design of flows that organize spaces between them.

 “In other words, because of the passage of time, landscape decontextualizes its artifactuality and takes on the appearance of something natural.”  

Corner, J. (1999) Recovering Landscape, New york : Princeton Architectural Press (p.157)