Landscape Architecture: Landscape Architecture: - School of ...

Bernard Lassus works to defend and illustrate a new
modernity for the 21st century. While Modernist artists are
members of an avant-garde and produce blueprints for a
modern world, Lassus sees the artist as one among many
actors who search for a modern ethos. Within a multicultural
environment he strives to develop rational approaches that
anchor the lives of men and women in nature and history,
while also making room for individual agency. Thus his own
work belongs to several distinctive series of experiments
involving housing, city planning, public parks, motorways and
private gardens, to name some of the domains to which he
has contributed in recent years.
A Landscape Approach for the City of Sarcelles
In 2000, Philippe Panerai – the newly appointed city planner
at Sarcelles, near Paris – called upon Lassus to propose a
landscape design that would unite the community in both a
practical and a symbolic sense. Sarcelles has attracted a great
deal of public attention since its rural landscape became the
site for a housing project of 8,000 apartments, increasing its
population from 9,000 in 1954 to 52,000 in 1970. Such
enormous growth turned the city into a symbol of the hopes,
fears, achievements and failures of modern housing policies
in France. It also divided the community into two parts, the
large-scale housing project physically isolated from the rest of
the city and governed by a housing manager rather than by
the elected mayor.
Lassus proposed making the community’s links to nature
highly visible. He transformed a large field area, still under
cultivation, into a living museum of farming, and uncovered
and opened to the sky the Little Rosne Creek that had once
run through the community. For the length of the
reconstructed natural banks of the valley he designed a
bicycle and pedestrian pathway that leads from existing ponds
Bernard Lassus, Project for a citywide landscaping of Sarcelles/Planting scheme for the citywide Park Alley, France, 2000
The proposed Park Alley would become the major pedestrian avenue through the city, transforming it into an imaginary park. It would
present a large path meandering between tree alignments planted on coloured ground echoing the colours of the leaves, fruits or flowers.
Bernard Lassus, Colouring of the warehouses, Bordeaux Harbour, France, 2004
Inauguration of the warehouses showing how colour can bring a sense of difference and community to a large group of industrial buildings.
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