Landscape architects have long used gardens as sites of experimentation. At his Sitio, 80km outside of Rio Di Janeiro, Roberto Burle Marx tended to a creative space where recursive acts of gardening and plant collecting were the basis for the emergence of a new language of planting design. [1] Similarly, the Danish Modernist Sven Ingvar Andersson experimented with the relationship between intention and coincidence in his family garden at Marnas. [2]

In conceptual and physical terms, public gardens have been created as catalysts for urban transformation. Between 1983 and 1992, the Conservative government of the day funded 5 national garden festivals at degraded post-industrial sites across the United Kingdom. With the intention of catalysing an urban renaissance in each festival’s respective city, the initiative used vegetal matter as a metaphor for renewal and growth.[3]On the occasion of the festival’s opening in Liverpool, Queen Elizabeth remarked that while “plants wither and die … with the coming of Spring growth begins again … garden exhibitions blooming on this site are symbolic of what we all wish for Liverpool.”[4]

Personal ambitions and municipal intentions conspire in the case of Lausanne Jardins. First staged in 1997, this year’s rendition of the garden festival uses the terrestrial and aquatic realm of Lausanne as a site for experimentation and environmental encounter. Therefore, in contrast with convention, the extents of Lausanne Jardins is not circumscribed by the fenced limits of a private estate, or brownfield site, limiting both access and chance encounters. By adopting a strategy of disruption, Lausanne Jardins engages the city’s populous as its audience, infiltrating a residents’ habitual routines. With the aim of changing perceptions of water in the city, the 2024 festival focused its attentions on the shores and marginal waters of Lake Geneva. Spanning 6 km from the River Vuachère in the east to the River Chamberonne in the west, this area encompasses an urban park that was itself the product of a festival, the Swiss national exposition of 1964.

Through a competitive process, that gained international interest, the organisers chose 41 designs, each responding to a specific site and its wider hydrological connections. In line with the event’s aim, many of the design teams sought to evidence hydrological processes, structures and experiences that have either been lost, overlooked, subsumed, or perennially undervalued. With the aid of various apparatus that captured, redirected, syphoned and/or occupied the medium of water, the lake’s shore and its hinterlands were reimagined as transgressive spaces. By way of modelling natural processes, established orders were challenged. The logics of parkland circulation, hardstands, carparks, embankments, sporting grounds, and beach groins, among other features, were called into question through the incorporation of water. Rather than being detained for show, moving water was readily employed as an instigator for growth and deposition. The following gardens are examples of this and related strategies; photographed during a visit to the festival in July 2024.

Au-dessus du gazon, le brouillard

Located within the limits of the drained and dried out Flon Valley, the use of mist catchers evidences the continued presence of water whilst re-establishing the noticeable presence of water at grade. Water vapour caught in the nets of mist catchers drained into gutters that fed newly created wetlands. These bodies of water, in form and function, contrasted with the inherent logics of an adjacent sportsground, its manicured uniform green swords heavily reliant on irrigation.

Project team:
Forme commune atelier d’architecture et paysage; Luciano Antonietti; Alice Fiorini; Basil Merz; Flore Schärrer; Katia Schmit; Sylvie Viollier; Cyril Verrier

More about the project at Lausanne Jardins.

Dune du Vent Bleu

A sense of expectancy accompanies a protective berm, constructed using sand from Lake Geneva. Located some way from the lake’s edge, the intervention speaks to the potential for inundation resulting from a changing climate. At the same time, the berm’s location and material constitution speaks of a lost shoreline and its attendant processes.

Project team:
Marie Alléaume; Nathanaëlle Baës-Cantillon; Rodolphe Raguccia; GRUE

More about the project at Lausanne Jardins.

Mél-usine au Jardin

Atop a lakeside hardstand, mounds of local sediment and gravel were fed from above by the waters of Lake Geneva. This water was intended to support a range of Swiss ruderal species known for their capacity to remediate. The hypothetical role of these substrates would appear two fold, calling into question the health of the lake’s waters and its modified terrestrial hinterland.

Project team: KollektiveLand – Camille Delègue; Günther Galligioni; Martin Koenig

More about the project at Lausanne Jardins.

Passons l’éponge!

An artificially constructed and irrigated growing medium, a ‘sponge’, sustains a summer’s plantings atop the surface of the esplanade’s ‘furniture’, a collection of cast in-situ Circulateurs. The capacity of the sponge to hold water called into question the role of soils across the city as its hydrological reserves oscillate between too much and too little.

Project team: BÖE studio – Nadia Grünig; Barbara Marie Hofmann

More about the project at Lausanne Jardins.

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[1]Raxworthy, Julian (2016) “The Sitio Roberto Burle Marx: A Case Study in the Garden as Scientific Laboratory or Vegetal Studio for a Moving Work of Art?” Landscape Review 16(2). 59-70.

[2]Raxworthy, Julian (2018) Overgrown: Practices between Landscape Architecture and Gardening, MIT Press, 113-164

[3]Wetherell, Sam Potter (2021) “Sowing Seeds: Garden Festivals and the Remaking of British Cities after Deindustrialization,” Journal of British Studies 61(2).

[4]Ibid.

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Rhys Williams
seenotherwise.me
rhys.williams@uts.edu.au

Rhys is program director for landscape architecture at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Through the development of critical approaches to photographing landscape architecture, he investigates the actuality of built projects, with an emphasis accounting for the medium’s propensity for change. A growing body of work forms an evidential basis for the generation of new theories and histories on the topic. These aim to elevate and extend landscape architecture/photography, affording newfound attention to a practice that has long escaped adequate critical attention, despite its ubiquity. Rhys invites collaborations with practitioners, practices and fellow researchers who share an interest in exploring the potential of landscape architecture/photography.

Published on October 22, 2024