Gilles Clément
Gilles Clément is a landscaper, gardener and author. Father of many concepts such as the "Garden in Motion", the "Planetary Garden" or the "Third Landscape", he favors the living to formal resolution in its spatial approach. Graduated from the École d’Horticulture de Versailles, which will become the École Nationale de Paysage de Versailles, he teaches there for many years, in parallel with his landscaping projects, which allow him to put into practice his theories. He thus signed many projects including the André Citroën Park, the Quai Branly Garden, the Henri-Matisse Park in Lille - which hosts Île Derborence -, the roof of the Saint-Nazaire underwater base, the Domaine du Rayol, among others. In 2011-2012, he holds the annual chair of artistic creation at the Collège de France.
“ Every citizen on the planet is a gardener. ”
“ Every citizen on the planet is a gardener. ”
The gardener's intelligence
Gilles Clément coined the concept of the ‘planetary garden’ which invites everyone to take care of the Earth as they would a garden. Having all too often been confronted with the sheer ignorance of how ecosystems and the living world operate, he, therefore, proposes creating a Ministry of Knowledge to lift us out of the ‘Stupidocene.’ Read transcript A PCA-STREAM production Coordination: Jasmine Léonardon Editing: Mattéo Caranta Music: Alexandre Desplat
Getting out of the Stupidocene
Gilles Clément is a landscaper, gardener and author. He deeply questions the way in which man enslaves nature, treats it to its aesthetic tastes and tries to rationalize its functioning to meet its most immediate needs. He denounces our ignorance of the interactions in between living beings, which leads us to a fatal impoverishment of biodiversity. He supports the idea that the principle of precedence of the living should condition every landscaping project – and more broadly, all town and country planning projects.
Favoring the Living over Form
Beyond the pursuit of progress solely as a belief in an ever-increasing technological control over the world, to compensate for global disruption, new relationships between man and nature and the living continue to develop. The gardener-landscaper Gilles Clément reveals how his activity connects him to all the living beings which interact to maintain the balance of an environment. From this he has developed the concept of the “garden in movement,” a method of gardening that favors the living over form. Rather than a completely hands off approach, it is a collection of interventions to accompany nature rather than oppose it. On an urban scale, his approach as a landscaper valorizes, even stages the “Third (estate) landscape”— abandoned spaces and interstices that form numerous reserves for biodiversity that are essential for human survival—in a symbolic and pedagogical way. Progress could thus be defined not by the illusion of mastery, but by a deeper understanding of the complexity of the living of which we are a part. Conversation between Philippe Chiambaretta and Gilles Clément
Training Citizen Architects to Serve a Community
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.
Collaborating with situations
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.
Design: Reparation
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?
From "Mediance" to Places
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.
An Attempt to Drain Places
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.
Maximizing reuse, minimizing transformation
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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