We... the Climate by Agence TER. Photo: Karolina Sambroska.
The 2025 edition of the Biennale d’Architecture et de Paysage (BAP!) is taking place in Versailles from May 7 to July 13. This third edition, titled “The Living City”, focuses on preserving life in all its forms amidst climate disruption and dwindling resources. It aims to open new perspectives and sharing of knowledge and innovation around architecture, landscape, and urban planning in the Paris Region and beyond.
At the heart of Versailles’ iconic Potager du Roi, the exhibition We… the Climate, invites landscape architects, urban planners, scientists, students, and citizens to collectively explore and confront today’s climate challenges. Designed as a living laboratory, this open-air exhibition evolves continually with wind, rain, and sunlight becoming active participants, vividly illustrating climate dynamics in real time. Its centrepiece, the 300-meter-long Climate Table, is both a physical and symbolic platform for dialogue, demonstrating landscape architecture’s interdisciplinary approach and its vital role in fostering adaptation, resilience, and reconnection with our ecosystems. Positioned at the crossroads of tradition and innovation within this UNESCO-listed historical garden, We… the Climate becomes an immersive exploration of sustainable visions, collective intelligence, and ecological stewardship, highlighting the potential of landscape practices to shape our shared environmental future.
What was the curatorial policy? Who did you bring to the table?
The exhibition Nous… le climat –(We… the Climate) is based on a living, evolving, and collective approach — an open-air exhibition that lives with the climate. The experience of the visit is shaped by sensations such as the wind, rain, heat, or walking through water. The exhibition showcases committed initiatives, stories, and tools drawn from the practices of the landscape architect and urban planner.
The Landscape Table, 300 meters long, is both the symbol and the medium of our approach. It crosses the King’s Kitchen Garden (Potager du Roi), connects the city to the park, and spans the water. It is a working table. It embodies our way of developing projects: sitting together, analyzing, drawing, listening, discussing, formulating, and testing. It evokes the way we defend the creation of landscape: collaborative, open, and cross-disciplinary.
Around this table, we have invited a diversity of voices: landscape architects, urban planners, ecologists, sociologists, agronomists, engineers, students, residents, and elected officials. The landscape profession sits at the crossroads of all these disciplines. We have highlighted its ability to build connections, to read environments, and to weave together diverse forms of knowledge in order to design living and resilient territories.
The exhibition presents several significant projects that reflect this approach, notably the Athletes’ Village, built in Saint-Denis Pleyel as part of the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The outdoor spaces were designed by Agence TER. This complex site, once heavily paved and dominated by infrastructure, has been transformed into a system of living soils, permeable public squares, vegetated corridors, and urban microclimates. Water is managed openly, cool islands are rooted in the ground, and biodiversity is welcomed. It is a powerful example of landscape design conceived as climate infrastructure. It perfectly illustrates our way of ‘working with’ the living world.
The exhibition shows that these strategies can be replicated and adapted elsewhere whenever collective intelligence is mobilized.
The line, stretching over the axis, is quite symbolic.
This line is the Landscape Table. It embodies our stance: to set the table, to invite people to sit, to debate, to share, to eat. It serves simultaneously as the exhibition’s foundation, a stage for discussion, and a gesture of temporary urban design. It traces a major axis of Versailles in the footsteps of Le Nôtre and reveals the site — its climate, its topography, the garden’s activity, and the work of the École nationale supérieure de paysage.
It brings contemporary purpose to the historic garden axis — no longer to assert order, but to open a space for exchange.
This scenographic installation — designed in collaboration with Studio 5.5 — acts as a forum for debate throughout the duration of the Biennale. Painted yellow, it celebrates the color of the Versailles Biennale of Architecture and Landscape, while offering a strong symbolic contrast with the King’s Kitchen Garden. It is a place to sit, to observe, to discuss, and to co-create around six thematic sequences that structure the table: from geohistory to urban resilience, from water management to listening to the living world. Each station offers both a physical and intellectual immersion into a dimension of landscape as a tool for climate action.
What kind of role does the Potager du Roi have today? If so, how would you redesign them?
The King’s Kitchen Garden is a living place, steeped in a unique agricultural and climatic history. Originally designed to optimize climatic conditions and feed the royal court, it remains a space for learning, experimentation, and contemporary transmission, where one learns to navigate uncertainty, hazards, and the living world.
The exhibition offers an opportunity to show how landscape projects can serve as bioclimatic levers, and it highlights the close collaboration between landscape architects, ecologists, and partners who support us daily in the ecological reconquest of cities and territories.
The Landscape Table sheds light on the profession of the landscape architect and brings to life the idea of a “school within the school” by presenting landmark projects from Agence TER, along with those of young agencies trained within Agence TER.
Nous… le Climat is a fertile ground for questioning our relationship to resources, food production, autonomy, and education. During the Biennale, the National School of Landscape Architecture (École Nationale Supérieure de Paysage) hosts a festive program of meetings, lectures, and roundtables. These public events transform the King’s Kitchen Garden into a true climate commons: a space where ideas flow, disciplines converge, and collective responses to ongoing change are explored and tested.
