The municipality of Issoudun appropriated a collection of small plots of land, susceptible to flooding, along the Théols river in the city center. We were placed in charge of transforming the whole into a public park. The plot design was medieval. Notwithstanding the extreme deterioration of the site, we were sensitive to the long history of working this land for horticultural purposes. We conceived of a process of substitution for these horticultural traces: everything remains in place yet changes in nature. Hedges replace fencing, flower beds take the place of abandoned vegetable gardens, decorative orchards and flowered meadows replace empty fields in neglect. The ground remains intact. The completed whole is made accessible to the public which succeeds very quickly in finding its bearings in this park where everything is new yet seems familiar.

The process of substitution is not merely deductive. In working on the transformation of traces through design and drawing, the process pertains indeed to the realm of architecture. Gardens, prototypes, laboratories, these are the places where a transposed “landscape language” can be experimented with and put to the test. In following, such a language can be applied to much larger territories.