(Italy, 1974 & 1975)
Les jardins fluviaux de la Loire / A turbulent urbanity is designed by ecoLogicStudio, with the goal of considering how to better understand the turbulent nature of the Loire, a “wild river,” and to speculate on a prospective urban model for Orléans. Looking to overcome the contradiction between preserving the natural heritage of the land and the city’s development, setting an objective of developing an urbanity in co-evolution with the river’s dynamic character, its microclimate, and its capacity to self-regulate, ecoLogicStudio has implemented what it calls a “decentralized spatial memory.” Given the fact that catastrophic risk management is entrusted to only a few people, without sharing, the agency has developed a new protocol, founded on local collective resources and know how. To achieve this, ecoLogicStudio has created, via a computational grid affixed over a portion of the Loire, multiple scenarios for gardens as hypothetical uses for the future: Garden of Accretion, Garden of Crystallization, Garden of Entanglement and Garden of Sedimentation. These “operating fields,” equally materializing thanks to the support of geological forms from the river’s evolution, offer a means of intervening directly on the riverbed.
