Earlier this month Knowlton was visited by Michel Desvigne, a noted landscape architect and the 2014 Glimcher Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Knowlton School of Architecture. He is known for his attention to detail and small scale development amongst large scale systems. In James Corner’s Agriculture, Texture, and the Unfinished he states that Desvigne creates ‘extremely sensible, rational, and strategic projects that at the same time approach poetic’ and approaches landscape architecture ‘as a form of earth making that is inevitably provisional, staged, and cumulative’. Michel has worked with countless notable architects including Rem Koolhaas, I.M. Pei, Herzog and de Meuron, and Renzo Piano. His projects range from the Saint Louis Art Museum to the New Qatar National Museum in Doha to the Lyon Confluence 2 and Ile Seguin prefiguration garden in France. He is currently working on numerous international projects, including the urban planning of the Paris-Saclay cluster.
Photo credit: Phil Arnold
The February lectures focused on Desvigne’s new development of the Campus du plateau de Saclay, a region in Île-de-France, and a hotbed for higher education institutions and research centers. On the development of the project Desvigne stated, “This will not be a city; this will be a group of campuses linked by landscape and transportation systems”. The current design calls for 450 hectares of campus and 500 hectares of park systems. On the design process, Desvigne stressed the importance of proportions and composition, especially with regards to time. “A city is a long time process. A garden takes even longer. You have to accept multiple speeds in one place. It makes no sense for everything to be choreographed at one time and place. It’s nice to think about the different speeds”, Desvigne exclaimed.
Photo credit: Phil Arnold
Michel’s February 3rd-4th visit included lectures and lunch discussions with the Glimcher Seminar, composed of a mix of landscape architecture graduate and undergraduate students. The works of the seminar in conjunction with the senior landscape architecture studio will culminate with an exhibition held in the Banvard Gallery, opening in late March. Including the February visit, Michel will visit the Knowlton School several more times to meet with students in the Glimcher Seminar, advise on the gallery progress, and lecture as part of the Baumer lecture series on March 26th.
Written by Wesley Cogan, an editor of One:Twelve.
One:Twelve is an independent student publication at the Knowlton School of Architecture.
Check us out at onetwelveksa.com
This blog will be a feeder for recent news, events and student work occurring at the Knowlton School at The Ohio State University. Posts will typically center around updates from the school's lecture series, exciting projects from recent student reviews and updates from other school events.
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