Catherine Mosbach is DPLG landscaper. After a career in biology, physics and chemistry at the Université de Strasbourg Louis Pasteur, she joined the Nationale Supérieur de Paysage de Versailles, where she follows the teaching of Michel Corajoud. Upon leaving school, she created the magazine Pages Paysages with Marc Claramunt, Vincent Tricaud and Pascale Jacotot. To answer to a commission from the Ministry of the Environment on the representation of the Vauban landscape-relief landscape, she is doing a DEA in History and Civilization at EHESS. Her practice reveals a taste for the experimental in the broad sense. Her emblematic projects include the Bordeaux Botanical Garden, the Louvre Lens Park and Gateway Park in Taiwan.
How can we create a dialogue between architecture and landscape? In this interview, the landscaper Catherine Mosbach details how her work of representing natural environments abolishes the distance between the public and the object observed.
How can we move beyond man’s position of dominance over nature? In what way can the living be articulated so as to improve the city? How can we create a dialogue between architecture and landscape? The work of the landscaper Catherine Mosbach represents natural environments—through the recomposition of layers of landscape—collapsing any distance between the public and the object being observed. She recreates environments in the city by playing with a set of parameters including plants but also topography, hygrometry, soils, and environmental pollution, in such a way as to counterbalance urban extremes and create islands of coolness and comfort, but also to provide paths and spaces for sociability. Within this approach, landscape and technology become complementary levers. The landscaper’s drawing must allow the hosting of events by giving up full control. In a similar fashion, architecture can no longer be so attached to the monumental envelope—form and frontier—so as to provide refined interfaces with the landscape, create porosities, and welcome transitions between the inside and the outside.
Designing an inclusive city implies involving their residents in urban projects, but what is the role of architects and urban planners in this process? For Andrew Freear, the head of the Rural Studio program, they both have the ethical responsibility of getting locally involved via concrete projects. Architectural schools must thus take on training citizen architects by engaging them in learning by doing, and thus have them redevelop a deep connection with context and places, acting as neighbors and activists within communities in order to collectively carry out experimental projects that tangibly improve society and the environment.
The two Lebanese artists and filmmakers were awarded the 2017 Marcel Duchamp Award for Unconformities, a project currently on display at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. This artwork, like their approach, is based on a methodology of investigation and excavation and aims to offer another reading of history and the traces of the past.
Nicolas Nova is a social anthropologist. Inspired by New Media Studies and design fiction, he contends that the future of design lies in recycling and reparation as well as reinventing forms and functions. Did you know that a used flip-flop could serve as a lighter?
The geographer and orientalist Augustin Berque revisits the polysemic dimension of the term “milieu,” and explains the distinction made by mesology—“the area of biology that deals with the relationships between the environments and organisms”—between “environment” and “milieu.” The reality of things differs depending on the environment of each species or culture, the object doesn’t exist in itself but according to its relationship with the subject. In this way, mesology goes much further than the subject/object dualism of modern science. Ontologically “trajective,” the environment is neither objective nor subjective, but firmly between the two theoretical subject/object centers. Berque takes the term “mediance,” meaning the dynamic coupling of the individual and their surroundings, from the Japanese “fūdo,” to which he adds “trajection,” a process that results in the “mediance” of human existence in its concrete surroundings. Taken as a whole, all human environments, distinct from the biosphere through their eco-techno-symbolic dimension, form the ecumene. For architecture, this implies a respect for history and the environment, without mimicking ancient forms, creating from the “mediance” of each place.
Larissa Fassler is a “Neo-Situationist” artist. By exploring places over the course of many hours, she gleans their ephemeral essence, which she then superimposes on the fixed urban master plan. The subjective maps thus generated highlight both urban narratives and history.
Maximum is a design studio that maximizes the value of waste; its material, its form and its engineering. Some materials are transformed in a semi-industrial process while others give birth to unique pieces, such as the glass walls of the Centre Pompidou caterpillar.
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