Wagon Landscaping is a landscape office founded by Mathieu Gontier and François Vadepied, joined by Estelle Ollivier.
Wagon Landscaping finds out and developp its projetc concepts in practicing and gardening landscape, observing plants and natures dynamics. The agency practice is based on ecological science and biodiversity developments, that Wagon Landscaping partners share in teaching (at Ecole Nationale Supérieure du Paysage de Versailles, in architectural university 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 attitude in practicing and designing landscape to “keep right for experiment, observe and adapt”, to share between people and nature, to imagine places easy to use and maintain, 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 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 projects design come from site, considerering its context and surroundings.
Wagon Landscaping work mainly in France, Europe and Russia.
Place : Nikola lenivets Russia
Year : 2008-2016
Dim : 100 ha
Architects : Wagon Landscaping
Funding : Archstoyanie festival
An architect and artist team from Moscow develop an outdoor art museum in the Nikola-Lenivets village, 350 km from Moscow. Every year, thousands of visitors discover new art objects during the ArchStoyanie Festival. From 2008, Wagon Landscaping works on 100 ha, gardening and sculpting abandonned meadows getting afforested. After drawing park masterplan, inspired by cultivated plots geometry, project took place threw several forestrial and agricultural workshop, sculpting pioneers forest, designing new perspective, creating scenography for art object. Agricultural and forestry practices develop extensive park maintenance.
location: 6 Rue Sainte-Catherine, 86034 Poitiers, Franceclient : Réseau Canopé, CRDPdesign year : 2009
year of construction : 2014
area : 2000 m2
budget : 230 000 euro
image credits: wagon landscaping ©
BET : Techni’Cité, Entreprise : Poitou Paysage
The CRDP (Centre Régional de Documentation Pédagogique) is located in the St. Hilaire’s abbey, in Poitiers. Its gardens are both free cloister reinterpretations, resuming their major principles : an enclosed garden, regular central space underlined by circulation galleries around. Those two gardens play with their own opposite : shade/light, dryness/moisture, tallness/smallness. The contemporary abbey function is a pedagogical information centre where children and students come to develop their knowledge with schools or by their own. The garden emphasize as well this pedagogical function showing traditional plants from the cloister time and from abroad, as a botanical garden.
Command : King’s Lynn City council
Context : Art, Cities and Landscape Festival
Budget : 15 000 euro
Date of realisation : June 2013
Surface : 150m²
Unpacked garden
Main ideas: In the past, until the railway time, Purfleet was considered as an activities and economics heart in the King’s Lynn city. A place for life, exchange, building, departure and arrival from abroad. The un-cheap garden will show up and emphasize this forgotten activities and remind to people this exchange qualities threw plants collections and wooden construction (reminding the fret storage).
A new garden on a car parking :
There are too much place for cars and not enough space for wildness and nature in the King’s Lynn city center. Project propose an other way of being in city on the Purfleet site, showing that today city centers may show up a new contemporary way of living, emphasizing alternative way of moving and living, taking care about surroundings and ecological aspect. This approach may have a meaning of thinking urban spaces as garden (on wide meaning). As if each citizen would be able and ready to think outside area as a garden. Taking care about future, helping growing and developing city in the best way he can : as a gardener would take care of his own plants and garden.
client: city of Kortijk
design year : 2009
area : 2000 m2
budget : 20000 euro
image credits: wagon landscaping ©
In the city centre, a tree plot at the edge of a parking lot, is a remnant of the former moats that have been filled gradually for city needs. The real urgly point next to site is a car parking . The project propose to recycle the parking corner into a garden and imagine a new future for the old moats. Issues of urban planning are deeply subjected to new economic and ecological constraints. Our proposal is design experimentation based on public space recycling and biodiversity in urban area.
Place: Kortrijk – Belgium
Year: 2014
Cost: 60 K euros
Dim: 2 000 m²
Architects: Studio Basta and Wagon Landscaping
Lifetime: 5 years
Construction time: 3 weeks
Funding: public / private
Flash Code Garden
In Kortrijk, on the Lys edges, the linen museum is opening. In the past, thanks to the linen industry, the river Lys was called the « golden river », as for the linen color as for the economic aspect that it produced for the Kortrijk’s region. In 2014, a temporary garden celebrates the link between edges and city, where the linen was storage. The project proposes an asphalt recycling to transform a parking place into a garden, emphasizing economic and ecologic aspect in the way of building. As for design, the garden masterplan represent the museum flashcode, offering some comfortables rooms into a labyrinthic space, lost in the city.
