Gilles Clément
Gilles Clément is a landscaper, gardener and author. Father of many concepts such as the "Garden in Motion", the "Planetary Garden" or the "Third Landscape", he favors the living to formal resolution in its spatial approach. Graduated from the École d’Horticulture de Versailles, which will become the École Nationale de Paysage de Versailles, he teaches there for many years, in parallel with his landscaping projects, which allow him to put into practice his theories. He thus signed many projects including the André Citroën Park, the Quai Branly Garden, the Henri-Matisse Park in Lille - which hosts Île Derborence -, the roof of the Saint-Nazaire underwater base, the Domaine du Rayol, among others. In 2011-2012, he holds the annual chair of artistic creation at the Collège de France.
“ Every citizen on the planet is a gardener. ”
“ Every citizen on the planet is a gardener. ”
The gardener's intelligence
Gilles Clément coined the concept of the ‘planetary garden’ which invites everyone to take care of the Earth as they would a garden. Having all too often been confronted with the sheer ignorance of how ecosystems and the living world operate, he, therefore, proposes creating a Ministry of Knowledge to lift us out of the ‘Stupidocene.’ Read transcript A PCA-STREAM production Coordination: Jasmine Léonardon Editing: Mattéo Caranta Music: Alexandre Desplat
Getting out of the Stupidocene
Gilles Clément is a landscaper, gardener and author. He deeply questions the way in which man enslaves nature, treats it to its aesthetic tastes and tries to rationalize its functioning to meet its most immediate needs. He denounces our ignorance of the interactions in between living beings, which leads us to a fatal impoverishment of biodiversity. He supports the idea that the principle of precedence of the living should condition every landscaping project – and more broadly, all town and country planning projects.
Favoring the Living over Form
Beyond the pursuit of progress solely as a belief in an ever-increasing technological control over the world, to compensate for global disruption, new relationships between man and nature and the living continue to develop. The gardener-landscaper Gilles Clément reveals how his activity connects him to all the living beings which interact to maintain the balance of an environment. From this he has developed the concept of the “garden in movement,” a method of gardening that favors the living over form. Rather than a completely hands off approach, it is a collection of interventions to accompany nature rather than oppose it. On an urban scale, his approach as a landscaper valorizes, even stages the “Third (estate) landscape”— abandoned spaces and interstices that form numerous reserves for biodiversity that are essential for human survival—in a symbolic and pedagogical way. Progress could thus be defined not by the illusion of mastery, but by a deeper understanding of the complexity of the living of which we are a part. Conversation between Philippe Chiambaretta and Gilles Clément
Talking Data
Caroline Goulard is a data journalist and co-founder of Dataveyes. She turns collected data into digital experiences to make it more understandable for everyone. Thanks to new ways of visualization, it is now possible to understand a population’s needs and to develop services that anticipate new uses.
AI doesn’t replace architects but supports them
Researcher and data scientist Stanislas Chaillou investigates how AI can enable architects to support and enhance their practice. A small sampler of a new book published by Éditions du Moniteur in March 2021.
Co-creating a learning society
François Taddei is a geneticist and co-founder, with Ariel Lindner, of the Learning Planet Institute (formerly known as CRI). Conceived as a school for the 21st century, the institute combines artificial intelligence and collective intelligence to reinvent ways of learning, teaching and doing research.
AI facing complex urban environments
Hubert Beroche is the founder of the Urban AI think tank, dedicated to the field of urban artificial intelligence. He is the curator of the Eyes on the street lecture series, run together in partnership with the SCAI (Sorbonne Center for Artifical Intelligence), and explains here how urban AI can help us understand the city.
Complexity, multiplicity, and adapatation within ecosystems
Contemporary architectural research is often fascinated by biological life but with an approach that goes beyond simple organic metaphors thanks to recent technological developments. Alisa Andrasek discusses the link between biology and her architectural practice, and her interest in the distribution of information in natural processes—a complexity that she tries to approach via big data. Her work in computational design is influenced by the convergence between information and materials, in an increasingly complex and open synthesis which enables it to go beyond the production of form and address the dynamic processes of matter itself. Alisa Andrasek is an architect, director and founder of the Biothing laboratory. She teaches at the Architectural Association of London.
Modeling the City Using Proteins
Researcher Claire Lesieur works at the CNRS Ampère Laboratory on the Go Pro project, which applies a computational model developed for protein folding to urban environments. The shape-changing properties of proteins are put to use in an attempt to map out the opportunities for urban growth that don’t involve urban sprawl.
Demystifying and Repoliticizing Urban Data
In the face of the promises of the prophets of artificial intelligence and the marketing of those major economic players promoting the smart city as a solution to urban ills, Jérôme Denis and David Pontille remind us of the irreducible materiality and fragility of cities. Demystifying what they perceive as a form of “neopositivism” of data, they point out that data doesn’t exist per se, and in fact must be generated and then maintained at a significant cost. As a result, data is never neutral and takes on a fundamentally political dimension. Understanding this framework leads them to promote a paradigm of maintenance and fragility, instead of the more common one of sustainability and resilience, when approaching urban realities.
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