Landscape Machines
Québec, Canada
FRQSC Founded project
The Landscape machines project is an exploration of the theme of porosity and of the transformation of sensitive territories as described by Gilles Clément. The project is located in a former quarry adjacent to the ruins of a demolished brick factory. A stratigraphic - almost archeological - mapping helps to understand the spatial structure from its topography and its vegetation to its different auditory and olfactory environments.
A series of nine different interstices, revealed through site visits and studies, were chosen as the locations of the porous walls. These objects are imagined as a kind of ‘refuge’, elements where the urban nomad can come to rest. The porous wall enables the relationship between the self, the body, and the open landscape to be measured. At the beginning of the process, each wall is a monolith of regular dimension (0.80 m x 2.4 m x 12 m), which is then deformed, pierced, and excavated by the tensions perceived in the landscape and by the different possibilities and demands of the minimal habitat.
As a medium, the porous wall creates a link between the open space and the subject. The wall, the typical delimiter of inhabitable space, becomes inhabited and free from its definition as a ‘limit’ merging with the landscape. Those who inhabit it find themselves in direct contact with the surrounding landscape, in the hollow of an interval-object.
This porous architecture combines the abstraction of the pure volume, equal everywhere, with the complexity of its location. It is an architecture that ‘grows’ like the seeds thrown into a field described by Gilles Clément: it immerses itself in the environment in which it is located, acquiring forms specific to each situation.
Assistants : M. Boucher-Côté, J.B. Morissette, M. L’Hébreux, M. St-Amand, S. Bernier-Lavigne, E. Cardu-Gobeille, Gabrielle Nadeau, M.I. Calvo, K. Demin, E. Bernier, A. Arsenault
Topography, vegetation, ground textures, streams, remains of former buildings, and ruins are recorded and indicated on the quarry site plan. This stratigraphical reading enables a gradual comprehension of the progressions of the landscape and the relations that come about between the different fragments forming this environment.
A 360° photographic study around the point of intervention adds a landscape component to the elements characterizing each specific site. The elements in the landscape that seem important for the project are identified according to their location in the visual field. This new layer of information links the site to the visual elements of the surrounding landscape.
Whereas such distortions contribute to making the architectural object an element in symbiosis with the site and the landscape, the porous wall is not yet an element that invites human presence, even when considering it a ‘dwelling’ reduced to a minimum.
Inscribed in the site and immersed in the landscape, the walls are deformed and perforated, making room to be inhabited. An architecture ‘of interval’ emerges in the context of the third landscape, like a fleeting moment, a pause, in the continuity of place.
