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.
