Landscape Architecture Australia
Lo-fi landscapes
Terremoto (US) and Wagon Landscaping (France) are part of a group of small, young and nimble practices that are exploring a semi-informal, DIY approach to designing and constructing landscapes that elevates imperfection as an aesthetic choice.
The founders of Terremoto and Wagon Landscaping talk designing public landscapes on a tiny budget. Interviews by Alex Breedon and Liam Mouritz.
Wagon Landscaping is a Paris-based practice with a DIY attitude that combines landscape architecture, construction and gardening. Founders Mathieu Gontier and François Vadepied trained at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure du Paysage de Versailles where they were encouraged to “think like gardeners.” The studios sees itself as continuing a rich hands-on tradition in French landscape architecture. Alex Breedon –
Your approach to designing and constructing landscapes appears very hands-on. Does this approach differ from that of other landscape architecture offices in France?
Mathieu Gontier –
I would say that we’re not working in a “classical” landscape architectural way. This way of working really began when me and my partner, François Vadepied, started the office. We’ve always been conceptual designers, but from the very beginning we’ve been gardeners and builders too. In that way, we’re a bit different to your typical landscape architects. We design in a way that’s more minimalistic, in many senses, the way that a gardener might design. We apply this to all scales. From masterplans to small plots, we try to keep the philosophy of the gardener throughout.
Liam Mouritz –
Can you explain your design process, from drawing and representing your designs to gardening and construction?
MG –
We have two processes. The first involves the typical process and design stages that you will find in most landscape architecture offices, it’s a process that is really driven by government regulations, legality, and the desire for financial clarity. In the second instance, we have our own more intuitive process that is really a “Do It Yourself” approach that involves constant testing and adapting. When we’re doing it DIY we’re much more dependent on sketches, rather than any documentation or design through the computer. Even on projects with a more typical design process, we still use our DIY process, constantly modelling and altering through the project’s evolution.
LM –
How do you mix different projects and scales, while keeping some philosophical consistency in your approach?
MG –
It’s hard, because generally business culture and clients want you to be a specialist. But when you have a gardener’s philosophy, when you’re seriously considering a site, you can’t have an automatic answer. We don’t really have pre-considered solutions, which allows us to be more open and attentive to new ways
of approaching things. I think this really helps us transcend project scales, from small gardens to large territories.
AB –
Let’s talk about your masterplanning work. Typically, one would say, the bigger the project, the more expensive and complicated it is. How do you approach designing big sites when the budget is small?
MG –
A good example for us is Archstoyanie Park in Russia where I think we produced a great project with very little money. This was really about having a good reading of the site. What we’d hoped to do was to try and re-ignite some landscape, agricultural and construction knowledge that had disappeared from the area since the Perestroika.
We developed an open-air garden museum, just using simple agricultural machinery and techniques. Using local people’s tractors and crop harvesting equipment we cut axial paths to structure and organize movement and create landscape experiences through fields, meadows and forest areas. We also enhanced different “ambient zones,” cutting the understory of forests using a whole manner of local equipment from ride-on mowers to standard gardening shears. You can do a lot with little money, if you just focus on the field of “maintenance.” You can be really active and influential on a very large scale. Just by cutting grass, you can build a whole project from that – a whole park in fact!
When we were doing our first site visit and our first sketches, we were not just looking at plants and landscapes, we were also looking for people to help us; community groups, interested people and the caretakers of these spaces. All of these people can really help to make a project economical and efficient. It’s about bringing a site, a landscape and the people around it all together – this is what defines a project. In a way, this whole project was about creating connections between different groups of people.
AB –
What other projects really emphasize this connection between people, site and building communities?
MG –
Jardin des Joyeux, outside of Paris, is a great example. The client called us after the ongoing degradation of a big car parking lot. Originally, the lot was a big issue for the client; it was hard to manage and young people would use it to do burnouts with their cars and motorbikes. So, in a moment of passion the client destroyed the concrete with a jackhammer. They then called us and said, “We have a big problem, we’ve got all this rubble and 30,000 euros, can you help us?” We told them that if we removed the rubble, all the money would be gone. So, our idea was to leave everything on site, bring in some soil, seeds and see what we could make of it. In the end it really worked and there is a very unique garden there now. The project ended up being about 25 euros per square metre, it’s really not much.
We are constantly surprised by people’s positive reaction to the garden. Just after we’d finished constructing the project, two local people came up to us saying “When will they finally do something with this site?” not knowing we had just completed the design for it. We explained to them that this was the
design and that it might take time to really show. We later found out they really fell in love with the garden as it grew and now they are quite protective of it.
AB –
Your work appears to challenge traditional landscape aesthetics. What are your thoughts on beauty in design?
MG –
Our approach is to explain that gardens take a long time to look beautiful, long after the designer has left. Because of this, with the Jardin des Joyeux, we decided that we would also maintain it. We would go five times a year to weed and maintain the garden. It was also a great time to catch up with the client, government maintenance teams and local people and exchange ideas about the garden’s future and adjust our maintenance regime.
Many of our projects are tests of economy and beauty. We tell the client that we will invest less money across a larger area and work with rough, second-hand materials. In these areas, we work in an ecologically dynamic way, where we plant smaller plants, garden more and embrace a longer growing time. Then, in a few small areas, we will spend more on a few nice details to give some richness to the project and to show that it’s “clean.” This contrast really works. It’s important for us to work with the client to prioritize a few expensive areas, rather than spreading it out equally. The result is often better this way.
LM –
How do you engage with large questions around the impacts of increasing inequality or the climate crises?
MG –
With regards to the social aspect, it’s very simple. We try to be on site and talk to real people rather than being stuck in big meetings in an office. That’s what we love about “site.” When you have a tool in your hand, we’re all on the same level. We also like to go from sketch to building very quickly, to avoid bureaucracy when you should just be on site making it happen.
On climate change, we focus on adapting our way of planting to a rapidly changing environment. We’ve changed our approach dramatically, even from ten years ago. Now, we’re experimenting with seeding nonendemic plants on many of our projects to see what will happen.
We are explaining to clients that this is all a big experiment, because we don’t know what will happen exactly with climate change. We know to some degree what will happen, but that doesn’t mean that it’s deterministic. Therefore, our design process shouldn’t be deterministic either. We must remind ourselves that we don’t know everything and we must embrace a constant state of experimentation.
“Our approach is to explain that gardens take a long time to look beautiful, long after the designer has left.”
Alex Breedon –
Looking at Terremoto’s website, there aren’t design drawings, but instead a lot of images of projects during construction. What kind of relationship do you have with landscape contractors?
David Godshall –
A lot of people think we’re “design and build,” but we’re technically not. We’re an aberration – we’re so deeply involved with construction that the boundaries between design and construction are blurred. When building our practice, we burned through a lot of bad contractors and now we’ve found people we really like to work with.
We’ve always photographed the construction process of our projects and published it widely. Originally, it was just something we did because we found it so interesting. But the more we do it, the more we find ourselves asking, “Why don’t other people document and publish this?” It’s strange to just showcase built work, where all you see is the final perfect built outcome. We know that landscape is messy and to portray that explicitly is important to us.
Liam Mouritz –
So, what happens in your projects after construction?
DG –
Gardens are outcomes of processes. There’s no denying that. We’re happy with the way we portray construction and labour, but this notion of maintenance is also eternally fascinating to us. We finish a project and it’s really just getting started!
I hope that at least at the residential scale, we’re heading towards a horticultural renaissance that really feeds into all of this messiness, simplicity and frugality we’re talking about. I think we’re at these crossroads, at least in California, where gardens are getting weirder, wilder and more ecologically diverse, but there is a dearth in gardening skill within the maintenance industry. We’re always coming up against this and we spend a lot of time trying to train maintenance people to work differently in the gardens we design.
LM –
Moving beyond the garden, do you have any thoughts about landscape architecture’s ability to address broader scale issues relating to the planning of cities and regions?
DG –
With regards to the evolution of cities, we need to touch on gentrification. It’s a tough subject. We live and work in Echo
Terremoto, founded by David Godshall and Alain Peauroi, has offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The practice’s work is conceptually rich and contextually appropriate, appearing in contrast to corporate landscape architecture practice.
Park where there is a young creative class moving in. When we’re designing gardens in these changing neighbourhoods, what we’re trying to grapple with is how we can improve this garden while not erasing its previous manifestation. What we try to do is to marry the new and the old in the site through horticulture, to maintain a continuity with what currently exists, while making something different and more ecologically focused. Across the world, cities, areas and regions express themselves through botany. As cities change, we gravitate towards the region’s botanical history in our designs in order to give the project some “creative context.” We’re also very much into the idea of a patchwork ecology, in that, if we’re consistently doing ecologically rich gardens, there will eventually be a positive impact. Not all, but many plants and animals can survive in a patchwork. Butterflies, for example, thrive in urban patchwork ecologies. This approach can become an ecological framework. Say, if Terremoto, over the next 30 years, does 3,000 small residential gardens in Los Angeles, we could theoretically usher in a sincere ecological response for local species.
Having said that, we’re not against doing larger infrastructural landscape projects. We’ve tried a few times, with projects up to the campus-level size, but we’re hesitant, because we haven’t yet been able to do them on our own terms. We’ve seen them as a great opportunity to do the Terremoto thing on a much larger scale, but we’ve found out that these types of projects really chew us. Clients aren’t interested in poetics at that scale. The opportunity to have slower, more nuanced conversations is gone, instead it’s all about renderings and constantly updating documentation packages. I think it’s a shame, because I think we could apply our process to a much larger scale, but we just haven’t found the right project yet.
AB –
We can see through your work that the typical mantra of “bigger is better” is being challenged.
DG –
It’s kind of strange here, in North America, where I feel like the corporate business structure that prevailed in the ’80s and ’90s is still hanging on. Bigger is better, you have to scale up and if you don’t grow you die. I think we’re at an interesting time – I’ve been speaking to a lot of people who are questioning this working structure. It’s more fun if we have a culture of tons of small offices designing lots of great projects, rather than a few larger offices just focusing on big stuff. I think we can change this dominant structure, and one way that Terremoto hopes to do this is to continue to build projects that are clearly different. Another thing to add is that, especially when I started working, there was a mantra that “the more expensive the better,” the more complex the design detail and construction, the better the project. And when starting Terremoto, we just flat out refused to follow this. I really think that there’s going to be a bigger return to this design simplicity that we aim for.
AB –
I heard you mention before that your Platform Park concept that transformed a vacant lot in an underpass in Culver City involved “no program.” Can you talk about program and its relation to garden design and landscape architecture?
DG –
A garden, in theory, doesn’t really need a justification. Whereas, in architecture there is a real need for architects to justify their buildings and spatial designs [in terms of function]. I actually think landscape urbanism is antithetical to the approach of “no program.” It’s often about performance and [in relation to a landscape design] is always asking, “What does this part do? What does that part do?” Even when that “doing” is about enabling indeterminate uses, there is still a preoccupation about the landscape “doing” something. While I think there is a place for that way of designing, I would hate to see it applied to all open space and landscape architecture projects.
There’s been this big movement in landscape urbanism, notable in response to the development of the High Line, to create these very prescriptive public spaces that leave little to no room for spontaneity. But if we look at how people have been using public space during the pandemic, it’s been the open, unprogrammed parks that have become the most beloved and most used, since the public has been able to use them organically and program them themselves. With Platform Park, considering its size, which is around a block long, it was easier, simpler and more effective to “let it be” and explore the idea of no program, rather than packing it full of stuff.
Some of my favourite parks are just “blurry edges.” Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, for example, is a massive park, it’s so big that it therefore has these really large grey areas. You enter into the park and often the planting isn’t really intentional and the place is full of interstitial zones that are fascinating, while also being completely devoid of program. I think these are often the most beautiful parts of the park. I do think that in Europe, they are much better at asking very little of their open spaces other than to just “be” and to be places of gathering. Hopefully, there is a bigger shift in that direction in North American culture.
LM –
What’s a favourite project that you’re working on at the moment?
DG –
Our most beautiful money pit at the moment is a project called Test Plot. Our local park, Elysian Park, is in a pretty bad state and we are organizing to build these “test plots” to restore this hillside that is totally racked by weeds and mismanagement. We’ve now planted our first four test plots and we’re working out what are the financial and mechanical human labour inputs that we can put into ecologically revitalizing this place.
We’re calling it a “rejuvenation project” because when we talked to the government and ecological restoration experts, they told us, “don’t call this ecological restoration,” because as soon as you say that it’s “restoration” there are a whole bunch of requirements that we would need to adhere to. They advised us against this because they thought that we were not going to be able to achieve this kind of puritanical version of restoration. We didn’t adhere to strict restoration standards, we were looser and freestyled it more. Thankfully, everyone was pleasantly surprised and next spring we’re going to extend the project.