On the rooftop of a new building of Keio University of Tokyo, Michel Desvigne was asked to create a contemporary garden which could preserve the spirit of the (disappeared) garden imagined on this site by the famous Japanese sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Taking up the idea of “representations of nature” that Noguchi used to associate to modern plastic art, Michel Desvigne based his work on the transposition of an aerial image of a small river. The scale was carefully chosen to be very close to the spaces conceived by the sculptor.

The visitor arrives thus at a garden in the shape of large slabs perforated by tall grasses and trees: a shape of nature belonging to the data-processing artifice, where Noguchi used the plastic artifice. This space is not composed of solids and voids, but of successive plans and passages with variable densities, in which one can involve oneself. The overall shape does not correspond to any clearly identifiable geometrical proposal. The location of the railing, placed very inside the roof, blurs still a little more the limits. The garden continues to develop behind this line, but the visitor doesn’t perceive any more the real invested surface. From these diffuse heights, his view extends on the city and the sky, without passing by the foreground.

Beyond this process of transposition, artifice and homage, the produced space results as a very well controlled prototype to be conceive on a larger scale.