2018 Edition: Gardens of Thought

Le dédale de la pensée

Thought is approached as a state of journeying, a journey that meanders through the brain’s byways, an intricate maze where it is all too easy to get lost if you do not take the precaution of unwinding a red thread. Points of departure and arrival have no real importance – it is the journey alone that counts.

A railway station platform marks the start of the journey into the garden, but the first suitcases are too cumbersome or too heavy to carry. Seen as so many benchmarks, constraints or attachments to a reality, the visitor must leave them behind or step over them.

The garden is designed so that the visitor moves beyond the structuring components of reality step by step. Colours, contrasting textures and vegetable verticalities become increasingly striking and present, until the traveller is fully immersed in them. Limits melt away, constraints recede. Henceforth, it is the garden that encompasses us. The visitor is lost in his thoughts, and then departs.

DESIGNERS

ARCHETUDE -Gilles DE KONINCK, State-registered (DPLG) architect and urban planner, Jérôme TOUZÉ, landscaper, and Julien SUEUR, State architect-

FRANCE

ARCHETUDE was set up in 1989 by Gilles De Koninck, who wanted to meet the growing need for interventions on major ensembles of housing units. ARCHETUDE has gradually developed and extended its competences over the years and now comprises more than 20 architects, urban planners and landscapers, all highly committed and determined to share their experience in order to improve our living environment. Today, the agency makes good use of its long experience and the skills available to it, and is active in every stage of transformation, promotion and preservation of territories.

Always drawn to what was happening outside, especially in parks and gardens, Jérôme Touzé finally made up his mind to make a career of landscaping. His initial studies at the École du Breuil revealed his passion for botany, gardens and design. More motivated than ever, he went on to obtain an HES (University of Applied Sciences) Engineering degree in Landscape Architecture from the École de Lullier in Switzerland. After honing his skills working with various companies active in the fields of landscape, architecture and urban planning, he now works in Paris for the Archetude agency, where he has found an ideal balance between design and work supervision.

Julien Sueur is an architect by training. A native of Picardy, he moved to Paris in 2004 to study architecture. In parallel, his interest in the vegetable world flourished as he taught himself plant composition and how to create structures by turning his hand to layout of decorative and kitchen gardens in his spare time. With a passion for drawing and travel, he makes good use of both to capture the ambiences he encounters and bring back plants from other lands. After graduating from the Paris Val-de-Seine School of Architecture and spending time working in various Paris agencies, he now works for the Archetude agency, where, alongside Jérôme Touzé, he develops the landscaping quality of architectural projects.