Eco-Cathedral

The Eco-Cathedral is Le Roy’s lifelong project and conceptual manifesto: an evolving landscape built not through master planning but through ceaseless human and ecological collaboration. Beginning in the 1980s with the patient stacking of bricks and stones, the Eco-Cathedral is designed to grow for centuries, a place where spontaneous vegetation, insects, animals, and human gestures converge in open-ended construction. It refuses closure, finality, and aesthetic control, offering instead an ethic of time, slowness, and unpredictability. The Eco-Cathedral stands as a provocation to conventional landscape architecture, suggesting that true sustainability lies not in fixed solutions but in the endless negotiation between culture, material, and ecological process.

The inaugural lecture, given by Joost Emmerik when he assumed his position as Head of Landscape at the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in 2022. The text particularly excels in embedding doubt into the teaching process. It is the doubt about nature, our entanglement with it, and the values and politics that drive the design process. It is about passing knowledge to others and questioning it meanwhile – a much more pertinent and productive teaching paradigm for times of uncertainties and change.

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