Landscape is a space of freedom. For a landscape designer who has broken away from architecture, like Jean Chevalier, it offers a way to think about our relationship with the living world, taken as a subject in its own right within a broader movement: trees that migrate, time that passes, coastlines that recede, a society that moves forward. Accepting this letting-go means shifting from object to subject, and entering a game that is both strict and flexible. Atelier Jean Chevalier plays this game through a simple vocabulary (mound, rise, furrow, ditch, etc.) and a radical iconology (theatrical, pictorial, spontaneous, etc.). Combined with a specific site and a particular history, these elements form a sequence that engages with contemporary issues: passing on a material that remains raw, adapting living monuments, producing the least effort.
At the scale of inner blocks whose heartbeat is often too faint, schoolyards suffocating with coldness, heritage gardens in search of a future, and public spaces for publics in search of space, the studio weaves site-specific grounding together with the transversality of landscape, culture with functionality, release with heritage.
AHA strengthened AJC’s positioning and designed its new website together with Paul Gacon, graphic and web designer.
New AJC website
