LILA 2024 Office of the Year

Wagon landscaping

Office Profile All / France /
www.wagon-landscaping.fr

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.
- from the award statements

Wagon Landscaping is a landscape office founded by Mathieu Gontier and François Vadepied, joined by Estelle Ollivier, Camille Bourgeois, Madeleine Accarain, Léa Nourdin, Frédéric Jorel and Valerio Costa.

Wagon Landscaping finds out and develops its project concepts in practising and gardening landscapes, and observing plants and nature dynamics. The agency practice is based on ecological science and biodiversity developments, which Wagon Landscaping partners share in teaching (at Ecole Nationale Supérieure du Paysage de Versailles, in architectural universities in Russia and Italy).

Wagon Landscaping operates in all landscape architecture contemporary fields like housing, public spaces, parks and gardens, in rural and urban areas.

Wagon Landscaping philosophy keeps a gardener’s attitude in practicing and designing landscapes to “keep right for experiment, observe and adapt”, to share between people and nature, to imagine places easy to use and maintain, and pleasant to live in everyday life.

In that way, Wagon Landscaping project approach combines attentive observation on site and workroom design to work from site to design (way and back) until the project completion.

The Wagon Landscaping thematics :
– Our projects are part of a thorough context analysis. Historical, geographical and social dimensions of the site guide our way of designing.
– Our way of projecting is “to do with” and “never against” Nature.
– Our plant approach is based on natural dynamics implementation.
– Our project’s design comes from the site, considering its context and surroundings.

Wagon Landscaping works mainly in France, Europe and Russia.