LILA 2024 Office of the Year
Wagon Landscaping is a Paris-based practice that has been featured on Landezine for many years now. They gave lectures for our platform, and our enthusiasm for their work has only been growing with time, mainly because we see it as a more and more relevant and interesting for wider use. Although their 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.
Their 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 water. 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. They build most of their projects by themselves; the office is also well-equipped with shovels, rakes and hoes.
The questions that arise from this position are a discussion we need to have. How much should we change 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 Wagon’s DIY reuse approach?
Through their clever landscape ideas and the masterful Versailles School-educated practice, Wagon addresses big issues on a small scale and establishes itself as a unique voice that should be heard widely in our global professional community.
See all LILA recognitions or visit LILA websiteWagon-Landscaping, founded by two landscape architects, François Vadepied and Mathieu Gontier, mainly works in France, Europe and Russia. Since 2010, the team has been completed with Estelle Ollivier, Camille Bourgeois, Madeleine Accarain, Léa Nourdin, Frédéric Jorel et Valerio Costa.
The Wagon-Landscaping philosophy
Wagon-Landscaping philosophy keeps a gardener attitude in practicing and designing landscapes to “keep right for an experiment, observe and adapt”, to imagine places easy to use and maintain, pleasant to live in everyday life. Wagon Landscaping finds out and develops its projects concepts in practicing and gardening landscape, observing plants and nature’s dynamics. Projects impose restrictions on materials movement and limit energy consumption emphasizing recycling and ecological dynamics.
This way of doing landscape is shared by teaching in Landscape Architecture schools in France (in Versailles and Marseille), Italy and Russia.
The Wagon-Landscaping project approach
In the Wagon Landscaping approach, building and gardening occur from the beginning of project conception; Jackhammer is on-site as a pencil is on paper. Approach method and design are constant back and forth between the studio and the site, considering this process as the basis for project development.
Wagon-Landscaping develops fields related to contemporary landscape thematic as housing, public spaces, parks and gardens in an urban and rural context. Sobriety and minimalism offer many opportunities to share experience, knowledge, and ways of opening projects to evolve and adapt appropriately for users: technical services, inhabitants, gardeners, schools, associations, reinsertion programs, etc.
Wagon Studio nourishes a multi-skills approach within the team, which helps to answer a wide range of subjects trying to keep an open mind and avoid using old recipes. Through its multidisciplinary approach, Wagon Landscaping emphasizes the idea of uniqueness and site-specific answers to the ever-changing context, focussing on space quality and live dynamics for all species.
Published on July 8, 2024
