Subterranean Material

The Bamboo Garden, Parc de la Villette, Paris
Designed by Alexandre Chemetoff

Anita Berrezbeitia and Linda Pollak write about this project in Inside Outside as a garden conceived out of material considerations as opposed to organizational form.  In this case, the material is water and soil (the entire garden is subterranean, with massive retaining walls carrying water through its highly visible weep holes), and pre-existing infrastructure, again, carrying water through the park.  I've never been, but I imagine the experience of this garden is incredibly visceral-- feeling the cool water weeping from the walls, ducking under concrete culverts and weaving in and out of dense bamboo clusters.

Botanic Garden, Extruded Wild

One of the major influences for this research is French landscape architect and gardener extraordinaire Gilles Clement.  Pictured above, Deborence Island is a massive concrete and rubble structure 7m high in Parc Henri Mattise in Lille, France.  The island is inaccessible to people, yet absurdly urban-- in the middle of a park in the city, created from the rubble of urban soils and deconstructed ground, filled with plants seeded by the wind, urban birds, possibly planted(?).  A model of constructed wild, the island appears to have extruded from the ground from the underworld or a chunk of the Garden of Eden plopped right into a crisply maintained public French park.   

A representation and growing model of wild.  I love the squareness of it, a collected sampling and redistribution of botanic diversity, a contemporary Padua.