Festival des Architectures Vives is an architecture festival organized in the city
Montpellier, France. This year, they invited Harvard Graduate School of Design to
participate in it. In early 2013, there was a competition organized to select a winning
entry to be built in June.

We knew that the theme of the festival is “memory”; the site is going to be in a 17th
century old building’s courtyard; and the material is aluminum,  as a local factory
specializes in aluminum construction is the sponsor. We immediately thought about
“wishing trees” in some buddhist temple, where people tie red fabric to the trees; as well
as miniature landscapes. We wish to create  art installation that can interact with the
visitors.

The form is inspired by the miniature landscape in traditional oriental garden, but taking
the shape of lavender field of south france. Visitors can pick up the “trees” that etched
with seven human emotions according to Chinese philosophy, write down their
memories or wishes, then plant them on the “landscape”. The “landscape” is also subtly
indexed with year and age, to allow visitors to place the trees according to date and
age. We hope that visitors can become part of the installation through interaction.

The geographical distance and language barrier during the construction documentation
phase caused some communication inconvenience between us and the manufacturer,
which slowed down the process. But the factory’s high quality control and precision
allowed the final installation to be quite satisfactory.

The construction document was prepared in a short time, which didn’t allow us to build a
scaled model of the final design to study the connection points. There were some small
mistakes made, fortunately they didn’t affect the final installation. Through this
experience we learned that to achieve hundred percent precision, scale model and
mock up are always necessary, and should be done very seriously.