Stage 1
Wild Garden
At the threshold of a new development area that will bring residents, merchants, business people and passers-by, the project proposes to enhance the poetry of the place and to make of the existing wild landscape, a large wild garden.
- An ecological garden
The project is an enhancement of the existing vegetal wasteland which consists of a rich and coherent ecosystem responsible for the ecology of the place. It allows the conservation of the existing fauna, flora and bioretention.
- A poetic garden
The garden recomposes with the living richness of the place, in order to reintegrate it into a structuring urban logic for the site. The garden celebrates the intrinsic poetry of its landscape.
- A continuous garden
The garden works on the erasure of the limits, betting on the fluidity and the sharing of the public space.
- A garden for all
The wild garden is a public space on the scale of the city, but it is primarily intended for the current and future users of the site, promoting the establishment of a rich and dynamic neighborhood life.
Stage 2
The Wild Garden
Our project title "The Wild Garden" can appear paradoxical considering the highly urban site to which it is addressed. We believe that some ideological precisions are necessary and deserve to be stated. Here is therefore, in addition to the text presented in the first phase of the competition, the evolution of our reflection. In this painting by David Hockney in 1980, which was our guide and inspiration throughout the project, the relationship and tension between the City and nature is stated. It clearly demonstrates the rugged nature of this landscape with its rough paths, steep places, chasms, and landscapes that are quite different and at odds with the orthogonal grid of the City. To speak about wild landscape is undoubtedly paradoxical insofar as the landscape, if one does not want to lose the term in its most current fuzzy acceptance, is always built by the man, or it is the product of a cultural operation, mental and or real, where it supposes the intervention of the man, concrete and or aesthetic.
However by wild, it is necessary to understand, places of the non-culture, the wild is defined in the confrontation between two spaces, that of the cultus and that of the non-cultus. In fact the question is to consider rather the way to represent the wild place, to compose, to build an image referring to the idea of the wild. Our objective was thus to affirm the existence of a new approach of the urban: a current which puts back in the heart of the reflection on the contemporary City the articulation between the built and the natural and living environment. Our work has therefore focused on nature and the city. Questions appear. We pose the problems of the contemporary city confronted with the question of sustainable development. How to respond to demographic growth while avoiding urban sprawl, how to better ensure the transportation of people and goods while avoiding confrontations, how to avoid social segregation between neighborhoods, how to value different cultural identities, how to promote urban development and maintain sustained growth while preserving the environment. All these questions touch on the fundamental issue of the city's living environment, of maintaining the strong presence of nature in an environment rebuilt by man.
What we want to affirm is the existence of a new approach to the urban; a current that puts at the heart of the reflection on the contemporary city between the built and the natural and living environment. Faced with the incredible growth of the planet's population, more and more cities are developing in a sprawling manner with dense urban cores. The natural and wild territories, surrounded and fragmented, are disappearing. Nature takes over the collective imagination and represents more and more the object of desire. New concepts appear and let see suspended landscapes, floating landscapes and urban forests, all these hybrid landscapes become under the hand of men and nature urban living environments and open new ways to urban development.
Smith Street had become a neglected, inaccessible place, out of urban use. The layout of the railroad line gave it a non-aedificandi status. To think of a public space in this forgotten place in the making implied a radical reclaiming of the hillside along Smith Street and the railroad. To imagine a garden in this place seemed an almost unreasonable challenge. However, the reintegration of this natural space into the city's layout and its uses could allow for the recovery of links between the neighborhood in the making. The city has places where we would like nature to be free and which would contain a great biodiversity. Smith Street is the prototype of the urban wasteland. The wasteland is wild. It is a free and rebellious territory, a nostalgic refuge in an increasingly secure society. The awareness of its interest and its ecological potential transforms the abandonment of the derelict into a reserve of hope for the future. Beyond the land, the contemporary imaginary of the wasteland mixes both the poetry of the wild place as an artistic place but also offers the possibility of a scientific work. Depolluted, redesigned, our wasteland becomes a laboratory for the observation of biodiversity and becomes the scene of new natural conquests. The void becomes a biological fullness: as advocated by the French landscape architect Gilles Clément in his manifesto. Our proposal directly serves the city by treating its rainwater and regulating the climate. The forms of nature in the city have changed to break free from the traditional framework of the garden or the park. Thus, reconverted wastelands, abandoned areas (embankments), shared gardens, peri-urban agriculture, river or canal banks have enriched the palette of places that welcome and showcase nature. They reflect the current concerns of a better management of ecosystems and water management.
Our project is based on a culture-nature pact aiming at making men live in their world in agreement with all forms of life and more particularly with the natural environments. It is no longer necessary to simply embellish by adding parks, gardens or green spaces in large urban projects, but it is a matter of thinking of the city as a large living environment and of inscribing it in its natural environment and respecting the rules of functioning and balance. The wild garden becomes an unsuspected place where life abounds, both wild and sophisticated and controlled. Can we create nature as Philip Fry, art historian and gardener, experimented it, it is a question of rebuilding a third nature after having destroyed it and having given way to the urban wasteland. It is to reformulate nature from colonizing plants, it is to restore technically and culturally the nature after having destroyed it. The question of the wild in the urban project is paradoxical and complex.
(From competitor's text)
(Unofficial automated translation)
This project is perhaps the most similar to the winning project, mainly because of a similar landscape approach, focusing on the reintegration into the city of vegetation typical of railway wastelands. Here, the vegetation counterbalances the mineral character and the high urban density of the area. The strong presence - even the omnipresence - of the landscape has the great merit of being clearly highlighted as a founding argument of the project. However, if the concept of "wild garden" seduced the jury by its adequacy to the spirit of the place and by the strong tension it creates between nature and urbanity, it does not unfold here with the same amplitude nor the same conceptual vigor as in the winning project.
This performance represents a very contrasting approach to the urban environment. The vegetal spirit of this project creates a very aesthetic garden. The project relies primarily on the presence of this playful and innovative garden on the railroad embankment. The vegetation acts as a counterbalance to the urban density marked by the formal layout of the track at the edge of the buildings.
The jury members questioned the wild aspect of this necessarily planned and maintained garden, which calls into question its authenticity. The wasteland is replaced by a wild garden. This image of the wild garden is at the center of the project. This picture, becomes unique and precious in contrast to the urban world. The garden character evident in the urban wilderness disappears under the snow, although it offers a winter aesthetic potential that has not been well highlighted. The gardens occupy so much area that gathering spaces are eventually lacking throughout the site. The interconnection of the marshes is interesting. The water should flow well. The street layout is neat, the square is well laid out.
The garden resting on the slope supports the idea of the green development of the site. This vision of the site seems fragile to us. We are confined in spaces, fragile and precious like a jewel box, which distances itself from the rest of the city. The little space given to the alleys will make maintenance difficult.
Finally, despite the interest it raised in terms of the originality of the proposal, the performance did not convincingly develop this vision, making the realization of the project uncertain. This service appeared to the jury as a solution that in the end did not offer a real overall vision of the landscape innovations it called for. On the other hand, the playful qualities of the places created were applauded by the jury. The white gallery under the viaduct was also appreciated, taking advantage of simple and inexpensive solutions that would encourage the animation of the existing arcades.
(From jury report)
(Unofficial automated translation)
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