Contents
Preface 08
1 Comprehensive Thinking, Comprehensive Practice 10
2 Formation 24
4 Of Smaller Scale 66
3 A Garden Below: le Jardin des bambous, Paris 44
5 Topographic Response 94
6 Riverbanks and Shorelines 132
7 Reinvigoration and Renewal: Île de Nantes 158
8 Urban Repair and Directives: Grenoble, Boulogne-Billancourt 186
9 Low City, High City: Nancy 202
10 Architecture; Current Landscapes; Reflection 228
Notes 252 Bibliography 260 Index 264
Authors 267
Preface
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In the late 1960s, student protests at universities in France ignited a wave of social unrest that, in part, denounced what was seen as a widespread governmental retreat from participatory decisionmaking in urban planning. In the years that followed the confrontations, community ideals increasingly shaped national policies and the composition of urban centers. Broadly speaking, this was the state of the country, and the social and economic contexts, when Alexandre Chemetoff completed his studies in landscape architecture at the École nationale supérieure de paysage at Versailles, and entered the profession. The chapters in this book are less directed to situating Chemetoff’s projects in relation to those forces, however. Instead, they present a representative selection of exceptional environments realized by the simply titled Bureau des paysages, which Chemetoff founded and still directs. Its projects—whether smaller and more vegetal, or larger and more urban—reflect an astute awareness of the dynamic sociocultural, political, and ecological conditions of which they are a part. While Chemetoff’s architectural production warrants its own publication, this book instead centers on his accomplishments as a pivotal figure in twentieth- and twenty-first-century landscape architecture and urbanism, in which each project represents a poem written for the present, informed by the past, to be completed by an unknown future. In North America, knowledge of the Bureau des paysages and its designs has been scant, and in-depth information about the substantial contributions of the office difficult to find. If any work is known to a non-European design audience it would probably be the early, if iconic, Garden of Bamboo at the Parc de la Villette in Paris. This book attempts to remedy the lacuna by providing an overview of Chemetoff’s landscapes and urban projects that manifest “urbanism from a landscape point of view,” enacted at multiple scales and embedded within environmental and community concerns. Smallerscale landscapes such as his gardens and plazas demonstrate a mastery of plants, detail, and environmental situation. At the opposite end of the scale, the large-scale urban repairs in Nantes and Nancy illustrate urban designs born of place, and their tangible and intangible histories. There is much to learn from this multi-scalar approach to urban design. Rooted in landscape architecture it addresses complex urban parameters, integrates with existing and new architecture, and perhaps most importantly expresses a profound understanding of the human condition.
We might characterize Chemetoff’s work as that of an “urban tailor,” first devising a garment for the current body, yet allowing for growth and dynamic development that shape successive changes in the new composition. At the risk of abusing the metaphor, the resulting “garment” receives its final form from forces such as weather and time, and from the living patterns of its inhabitants. While visionary in their ideas and scope, however, urban projects by the Bureau des paysages remain firmly grounded in humility, generosity, and respect. In some ways Chemetoff’s belief that “a tree is not an isolated object” summarizes his thinking about designing within a specific environment. By this phrase he suggests that any intervention must consider what surrounds it and respond accordingly. Further changes to cities, effected incrementally through insertions and additions over time, derive from tests, prototypes, and public input. These are the strengths of his approach. Urbanism begins with landscape architecture—indeed, landscape as urbanism—by proposing a morphological and elementary vocabulary that addresses detail as well as comprehensive ideas—a process seemingly opposed to typical North American practice, where architecture is first marketed and only thereafter developed. Landscape design, too often subservient to architecture, is rarely permitted to go off script. Planning places the architectural blocks that reduce the landscape to green filler. In contrast, Chemetoff’s landscapes and urban rehabilitations demonstrate how to reform neighborhoods and cities by redefining the relationships among landscape, culture, and development. The projects analyzed in Alexandre Chemetoff: Landscapes & Urbanism embody the idea that landscape constitutes a set of relations derived from a clear pattern of incremental adjustments—many of them unpredictable—whose richness and beauty will increase over time. The works presented suggest possible directions for how we might confront the brutal realities of climate change while acknowledging layered and diverse histories, positive and negative —and demonstrate a mastery of working across disciplines and scale to “change everything without changing everything.”
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Alyssa Schwann Vancouver, July 2025
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1-9 [opposite above]
Square de l’île Mabon. L’île de Nantes, Nantes, France, 2005.
1-12 [below]
Plateau de Haye, Nancy, France, 2004–15. Community redevelopment and landscape.
1-10 [opposite center]
Urban design and landscape. Villejuif, France, 1990s. Mature plantings now fill the interstices, connecting building and landscape. 1-11 [opposite below]
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Quartier du Tripode. L’île de Nantes, Nantes, 2010. Waterway and landscape. The buildings were designed by Christian de Portzamparc.
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A Garden Below: le Jardin des bambous, Paris
Competition
Despite the passage of decades and the subsequent completion of projects of far greater number and scale, the Jardin des bambous (Garden of Bamboo) at the Parc de la Villette in Paris remains Alexandre Chemetoff’s best-known work in the United States and in much of the world [3-1]. Its notoriety stems from the simplicity of the idea that drove its design: a sunken garden whose vegetation was restricted to one primary plant: bamboo. The concept behind the design is evident and easy to grasp; its greenery demonstrates that even within a single subfamily there can be found sufficiently diverse varieties to produce a rich palette of experiences. The Garden of Bamboo is a poetic work, an intimate zone within, yet apart from, a park of far greater dimensions and far less spatial definition. It is a place more memorable as an experience than as a comprehensible form or space, and more than a collection of plants. Its subterranean situation positions the Garden of Bamboo within the tradition of the Italian Renaissance giardino segreto, removed from the greater world around it and a world unto itself. Although hermetic in its subterranean position, and in places today almost stifling in its sensed enclosure, the garden’s design nonetheless derived from conditions broadly determined by its environment and location within the park, while acknowledging the historical infrastructure demanded by an urban metropolis. The international competition for the design of the Parc de la Villette in 1982–83 attracted submissions from some of landscape architecture’s and architecture’s most prominent practitioners, among them Michel Corajoud, Sven-Ingvar Andersson, OMA /
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[ 3 ].
4-2
Place de la Bourse. Lyon, France, 1993. Maples emerging from the hedges. 4-3
68 / O F S MA L L E R S C A L E
Place de la Bourse. Site plan showing rows of maples and the variations in the stone paving beneath. North is up. [Bdp]
4-4
René Dardel and Auguste Monvenoux. Palais de la Bourse. Lyon, France, 1860. [Bdp] 4-5
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Place de la Bourse. Rows of oversized ceramic pots planted with sculpted boxwood.
5-13
Yves Lion. Apartment blocks. Villejuif, 1980s. Gaps between the buildings increase ventilation and connect apartments to the park beyond. 5-14
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Villejuif. Mature shrubbery brackets the paths and adds color, texture, and some degree of privacy.
5-15
Villejuif. Canal running along northern façades of the apartment block by Yves Lion. [Bdp] 5-16
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Villejuif. The canal in 2022.
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Quai Henri IV. The robust stair rails and stonework respond to the conditions of the site. 6-3
Quai Henri IV. Visitors appropriate the slopes and terraces, all in their own ways.
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6-2
banks are today publicly accessible, among them the Parc de la Presqu’île Rollet, which enlivens a peninsula on the river’s left bank. The green band at the park’s eastern end, however, offers few amenities beyond small pockets of woods and rows of trees so typical of the French public landscape. Other municipal parks have been relegated to strips of land separated from the water by long-standing industrial and commercial construction. The proposal to remove these structures, convert the land for public use, and design a new landscape for the Waddington Peninsula on the opposite bank of the Seine prompted a design competition held in 2011. To Chemetoff, “the two banks [had sadly turned] their backs to one another” and lost what had once been a strong reciprocal bond.2 In Rouen, the pair of competition sites did not directly face one another across the Seine, making any attempt to connect them by simply reprising any former design inappropriate [6-4]. Perhaps some resemblance, yes; but precise replication, no. At the time of the competition, the Waddington Peninsula was dominated by surface parking for the passenger ship terminal and the nearby maritime museum. A single line of trees offered the only greenery to screen the prosaic architecture and the expanses of pavement devoted to the automobile, van, and truck. The Chemetoff plan maintained the existing uses, at least to some degree, and planted concentrations of trees to soften the line between the parking lot and buildings. Dense clumps and bosks, varied in their arrangement, filled the gaps between the buildings, joining architecture and landscape as a continuous band when viewed from the river and the opposite shore. Downstream, the development of the left bank was more complex and intricate, intermixing a rich palette of trees, shrubs, and surface materials with structures of varied uses distributed linearly along the riverbank. Extending nearly a kilometer (3,250 feet) between the Gustave Flaubert and William the Conqueror bridges, the narrow site was planned as strips and layers positioned between the urbanized neighborhood and the water, intermingling paving and vegetation to define spaces for its programmed uses [6-5]. The band adjacent to boulevard Jean de Béthencourt features a broad promenade
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Reinvigoration and Renewal: l’Île de Nantes
7-1
Urban and landscape reinvigoration. Île de Nantes, Nantes, France, 2001–2010. The elephant enters the nef.
Although the plan for the Île de Nantes lacks the rigorous geometry of the playing board, as if in a game of chess the remaking of its urban fabric considered each move in relation to those that had preceded it and predicted those that would result [7-1]. And while focused on the island itself, the designers also pursued the larger goal of transforming the city beyond it. To manage the redesign of an urban, former industrial landscape in the middle of the Loire troubled by superannuated buildings and widespread dereliction, Alexandre Chemetoff proposed to “change everything without changing everything.”1 In addition, he believed that “any [individual] project on the island is a project for the [entire] island, and by extension the city of Nantes as a totality.”2 Considering the island’s size and the number of its existing structures and their diverse ownerships, the task would be a challenge. How could new uses be determined and accommodated in form, whether architectural or botanical? Should structures deemed worthy of retention undergo renovation, expansion, or transformation? Which buildings should be demolished, and how might the new structures acknowledge the ghosts still lingering on their sites? How much land should be allotted for parkland and public space? What formal character would be appropriate for this post-industrial site? What governmental processes would be needed to efficiently realize any design proposal? And perhaps most of all, how could the Île de Nantes’ transformation best serve and delight residents as well as visitors? 159 /
[ 7 ].
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7-22, 7-23 [opposite]
Parc des chantiers. Gantry crane in the western sector of the park functions as both campanile and portal. 7-24 [above]
Parc des chantiers. Riverfront promenade. Daniel Buren and Patrick Bouchain’s Les Anneaux are seen to the left. 7-25 [below]
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Île de Nantes. Low-rise, high-density housing.
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Urban Repair and Directives: Grenoble, BoulogneBillancourt
Apparent Reweaving
8-1
Parc Paul Mistral. The transition from the new elliptical planting beds to the landscape of the old park
In decades-long projects such as the urban planning of Nantes and Nancy, what began as selective ameliorations culminated in projects governing extensive areas of land and affecting numerous buildings. In other cities, however, a vision for the whole emerged through the accumulation of smaller, at times focused, proposals and interventions. Alyssa Schwann likened these efforts to those of a tailor altering a garment for a customer who has gained or lost weight—adjusting sleeve length, pant waist, or jacket shoulders to achieve a better fit.1 The analogy is apt. The comprehensive landscape or urban plan resembles a sewing pattern: the resulting “garment” must be altered to fit the specific site as to a specific body, and over time further modified as conditions change. By carefully examining what exists, even new elements can be considered as if already present: an urban fabric requires weaving the new into the old. Applied to woolen textiles, reweaving refers to the repair of damage resulting from tears, punctures, and insects. In repairing a moth hole in a sweater, for example, the weaver strives to restore the textile to a state so closely matching its original that the damage is no longer apparent. Applied to the fabric of a city, this process might suggest an exact replication, such as a precise reconstruction of buildings damaged by war. Applying the conventions established by the Venice Charter that govern the restoration of paintings and sculpture, Swiss geographer and urban theorist André Corboz proposed that any architectural intervention, such as restoration, should be identifiable and datable and that it should also be reversible. Applied to an urban fabric, this thinking suggests the use of
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[8].
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Architecture; Current Landscapes;
[10].
10-1
Bureau des paysage offices, Gentilly, France, 1989+. Street façade. [Bdp]
After two years of working with his colleagues at the Carré vert, Chemetoff decided in 1978 that it was time to build a more independent practice.1 Bureau des paysages, the generic-sounding name for his new firm, could be roughly translated as the “Office for Landscapes” or the “Landscape Practice.” First located in Paris, the office later settled in Gentilly, a former rural village outside Paris and today beyond the boulevard Périphérique, the ring road that today distinguishes the city from its suburbs [10-1].2 “Our bureau,” Chemetoff explains, is “an office for designing inhabited landscapes, cities, houses, and gardens, but it is also a place reflecting my philosophy and aesthetics of design.”3 Perhaps the firm’s location in Gentilly also had an influence on several commissions it has received: as shown in a site plan included in several project brochures, a number of the office’s works discussed in this book are located here in the valley of the Bièvre [10-2]. On the site of an ancient quarry and former workshop still enclosed by high limestone walls, the land and buildings to become the home of the Bureau des paysages were suitably renovated and fitted out with drawing tables, model shop, library, kitchen—all the facilities required to support a design practice. The computers and the accoutrements they demand arrived years later. The workspaces for the new practice were distributed over three floors. The street façade and other masonry walls were retained, using galvanized metal to sheath newly designed and constructed areas. Improved roof structure, interior metal partitions, and wood floors adapted the existing space to new uses, while an extension to the rear of the original building provided additional windows. Books and bookshelves were found
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Reflection
244 / A R C H I T E C T U R E ; C U R R E N T L A N D S C A P E S ; R E F L E C T I O N
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While Portuguese architect João Luís Carrilho da Graça would renovate the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMAC), the mammoth convention hall and national theater occupying several linear blocks of the park site would be completely demolished. The Louis Nucera Library enjoyed a better fate and is now under renovation by the Bureau des paysages as part of their overall scheme. The above-grade and much-needed parking adjacent to the library south of the MAMAC would stay, although its relation to the park would necessarily be reconsidered. Also to remain is the colossal and quite curious 2002 sculpture/ structure by Sacha Sosno, La Tête Carrée, whose realistically rendered neck and partial face support a cube with several internal levels of offices housing the library’s administration. The urban and landscape design for the park interweaves considerations of vegetation, materials, and form. It combines extended features, such as the formal promenade, with massed plantings that trace the path of river below and areas destined for more personal and intimate activities. Zones have been assigned to particular species of plants—bamboo among them—that will render the Promenade du Paillon an “urban forest” [10-13, 10-14, 10-15]. The relocated library— like the parking already situated beneath the plaza that forms its roof—also becomes a segment of the promenade. The streets flanking the central green space have been narrowed to reduce the speed and volume of vehicular traffic. One of its lanes has been reassigned to bicycles, buffered on both sides by heavily planted flowering and evergreen shrubs.26 In this section of the “urban forest,” a grove of jacarandas, whose stunning violet spring blooms will no doubt become among the park’s principal attractions, announces the entrance to the library and marks the midway point between its beginning at esplanade de la Bourgada and its conclusion in a grove of Australian tree species at the esplanade de Lattre de Tassigny. Below-grade culverts over the vaults will collect rainwater and divert it into a cistern the city describes as the size of an Olympic swimming pool; this amenity will provide irrigation, water gardens full of koi, and the pools for subaquatic plants.27
Promenade du Paillon. Section through the vaults that span the river with the new park above. [Bdp] 10-14
Rendering of the new park showing the prominence of massed plantings of jacaranda. Seen from behind in the lower left corner is la Tête carrée. [Bdp]
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