FLOATING GARDENS
ENSP 1984
Invention of landscape forms produced through transposed natural mechanisms.

I finished my studies at the National School for Landscape Architecture in Versailles.

I spent two years observing landscapes whose forms were explicitly linked to natural mechanisms: gullies, deltas, dunes. These forms fascinated me in that I could empirically experience the forces at work giving them life (like children on the beach playing in the surf's undertow). I lamented their poor and literal imitation found in the lines of constructed landscapes.

For the Floating Gardens I conceived of little devices that put into operation form-creating mechanisms: shade structures that varied the growth rate of plants, traps for alluvial deposits that formed into small islands, wind corridors that shifted the position of dunes... Devices belonging to the realm of architecture, distinct from natural forms.

The floating gardens project was published in the magazine Urbanisme.