Kamel Louafi is a landscape architect with a touch of classic grandiose. His work is instilled with a perennial feel that abides by the expressive tools of the visual art theory yet includes a strong design voice of personal poetics. The difference Kamel Louafi creates, the un-anonymity of his work could be even marked as exotic. Perhaps his diverse background and unusual language spectrum of Arabic, French and German, give Louafi a distinct position between East and West, understanding “both worlds’ landscapes”. In his rich career, he influenced numerous students and created so many large-scale public parks and squares, that they seem to cover a whole city. His theme is uniting and representing the world while his arabesques weave the space into a meaningful whole.

In landscape architecture, it is rare to be a nomad. What is it like to be transversing between the Occident and Orient, bridging the languages, cultures, and different codes of design expression and understanding deeply rooted poetics of lush green versus arid desert landscapes?

I consider myself a Nomad, and I always talk about my journey as my Arabesques. When I looked at the embroidery in Versailles and the hedges in the gardens of Ispahan, I found an association in the geometric shapes that suggested that one was inspired by the other. I also made an association with the clothes of the women in Algeria, of my mother, who always had embroidery, which can be found in compositions of shapes in gardens other than Versailles, for example, the Herrenhausergarten in Hanover.

You say that gardens are historically a metaphor for “harmoniously bringing together the two basic human attitudes towards nature – distance and devotion”.

What’s fascinating about the garden is its blend of fantasy and reality. It is capable of compensating for the gap between ideal and real that we are confronted with on a daily basis. Our concepts as landscape designers always express an ideal vision. In my lectures and writings, I say that it is interesting to draw inspiration from a metaphor based on an abstract image when designing a park or a garden.  

Drawing inspiration from Utopia or Babylon gives you plenty of scope for fantasy and allows you to add your own personal touches to your creations.

What do you think a concept brings to design, is it needed and what concepts prevail today?

If aesthetic design expresses the search for new forms that are adapted to their functions, it can make a major contribution to the concept of parks, gardens, and squares. 

For example, the Broderie de Versailles (which is above all a design concept) has been valid for several generations. 

How do you choose projects you work on? How do you see the role of the investor or the brief? What is your experience?

I’ve been lucky enough to win a lot of competitions exclusively for landscape architects, which has enabled me to develop my style, and my thinking about landscape architecture and to manage my projects according to my needs and my knowledge. Working on a number of projects with architects has given me a lot of experience, but unfortunately, as a landscape architect, you are the last to build your spaces. The costs of architecture, installations and all the other trades increase, and from experience, the client asks you to reduce your budget so that you can manage the unexpected costs of the other trades.

Please say a few words about the Garden of Exile in the Jewish Museum Berlin you designed with MKW Landscape Architects. It is a work of art – the garden is a sculpture we find ourselves in, and is one of the most extraordinary contemporary designs in landscape architecture, It makes one’s perception of space shift completely. What role does art have in landscape architecture?

I’d like to stress – and this is very important – that this is a project by MKW Landscape Architects. I was employed as a freelance architect and was appointed, among other things, as project manager for MKW in this project and project manager for the gardens of the Hans Galinski Jewish School by the architect Zvi Hecker. 

In his competition, the architect Daniel Libeskind named a courtyard after the poet Paul Celan. The professor of literature in Berlin, Hartmut Eggert, was initially my personal adviser on Jewish-German relations. He told me to look at drawings by his partner Gisèle Lestrange because Paul Celan once said that her drawings were a very concrete expression of her split with German culture.

I discovered the drawings, especially ‘les filets encore’, and I suggested that we transcribe this into the cobblestones. We worked on it in the office for a few days and MKW presented the result to Libeskind, who was ecstatic.

I would like to particularly emphasize that it was during this period that I personally began to interpret and transcribe the abstract images of parks, squares, and gardens in my mind and to create my arabesques. I’ve learnt how to use an abstract image to create concrete shapes and geometry … and that’s how my Arabesques came to be expressed.

What function do your arabesques have, for you, for the design and use?

My Arabesques are interpretations of ornaments for example for the contemplation of hedges, and borders (trimmed according to my compositions) and from time to time expressed by different geometries in my parks, gardens and squares that reflect the differentiation of spaces (vegetal, mineral, for example) also according to phenomena in the plant world of the four seasons or express for example surfaces serving infiltration of water, and so on.

And a quirk question – one would think the water consumption in the Jardin des ZIBANS is enormous, but you have literally created an oasis.

I developed Arabesques of water islands in the Zibans garden in Biskra, Algeria, because I had learned in the preliminary research that there was a layer of salty water 250 cm deep underground. I had this water analysed and found a quantity of 10 to 12 grams of salt per litre (the result of irrigation – the evaporation of the water under the influence of the heating sun and the wind absorbing the humidity increases the salt concentration of the remaining liquid). 

The freshwater was more than 50 m deep underground. 

I had started to think about the Jardin des Arabesques d’eau; I had learnt during a visit a few years earlier to a fair in France how to make up water basins – in Europe, America etc. they added 12 g of salt per litre (it was like that in all countries to avoid contamination) which was quite normal in the first layer of water in the Sahara of Biskra.

Thanks to our analyses and research, we received a building permit in Algeria to use this salt water instead of consuming fresh water.