Craquelures dans le réel
Lausanne Jardins 24 Festival
Every five years, the city of Lausanne holds a landscape festival called Lausanne Jardins. CRAQUELURES DANS LE RÉEL was one of the winning projects of the Lausanne Jardins 24 competition.
Over the past three months, time has been a significant design input for this garden. Landscapes are never constant but instead change over time, both seasonally and over more extended periods. Over time, landscapes undergo alterations shaped by natural processes such as erosion and succession, along with anthropogenic interference. Soil is capable of manifesting multiple lives.
The design proposed adheres to this condition and interacts deliberately to instaurate and interfere with landscape through the introduction of radical new morphologies. Plowing as a performative action is reintroduced on site. Both as an old imprint of farming history of a site that was once cultivated and a dynamic movement in relation with the parking lot. Soil is exposed and seeds planted.
The choreography follows with the introduction of irrigation devices and water features accommodating the growth of the new garden. This spectacle initiates a new change.
Natural rhythms of the existing and new landscape interfere together and all underlying life cycles of the site. The project’s purpose is thus to reveal nature’s scale dependence, ecological connectivity, and human-soil-water relations that characterize even more complex, dynamic landscapes. Unveiling this forgotten resource by plowing asphalt triggers the emergence of a reclaimed landscape and spontaneous growth.
CRAQUELURES DANS LE RÉEL functions as a manifesto in the Parking de Bellerive, revealing the soil to create a new relationship between the cars and the garden through a mechanical environment.
