Presented by the University of Manitoba
Time: 12:00 pm (CST) / 1:00 pm (EST)
Location: Online (Zoom)
From site to studio, from observation to realization and maintenance, Wagon will emphasize a gardener attitude in landscape projects which may be a way to think and develop tomorrow's city and to hope for a resilient future, inspired by natural dynamics.
Nowadays, what should we change in our engagement with landscape, program, transformation, and maintenance to minimize negative environmental impact? Where is the sensible and possible line between emission-heavy constructions and the reuse approach
Biography
Mathieu Gontier, landscape architect, is Wagon Landscaping co-founder. He has initial training in Arts and the Russian language. With this background he graduated as a landscape architect in 2007, keeping relationships between art and landscape. He retains from his initial training the use of drawing as a tool, for reflection and project.
François Vadepied, landscape architect, is Wagon Landscaping co-founder. He received his initial diploma in geophysics and cartography at the IGN. In 2003, after fifteen years in the digital cartography field, he decided to radically change his work. He graduated as a landscape architect in 2007. Since 2018, he has become a State landscape architect consultant in the Meurthe-et-Moselle department.
Wagon Landscaping is a Paris studio co-founded by Mathieu Gontier and François Vadepied. Wagon Landscaping finds and develops its project concepts in practising and gardening landscapes and observing plants and nature dynamics. The agency practice is based on ecological science and biodiversity developments, which Wagon Landscaping partners share in teaching (at Ecole Nationale Supérieure du Paysage de Versailles, in architectural universities in Russia and Italy).
Wagon Landscaping projects address a narrow niche of small-scale situations, the modes of attention and engagement with landscape that Wagon practices offer pertinent answers to how we could rethink the approach to landscape in other typologies and scales.
Wagon work is often conceptually intriguing and bold, yet based on minimal transformation, mainly dealing with conditions for growth and studying dynamics of the soil, plants and animals. A range of projects address asphalt opening and investigate the aesthetics that emerge from an ethical position of leaving the material in place. Although it could be seen as a reference to artist Lois Weinberger’s work titled Burning and Walking (1992), Wagon took the approach further into research and a range of diverse applications. Studio team build most of their projects by themselves; in addition to computers, the office is also well-equipped with shovels, rakes and hoes.