Alexandre Chemetoff (Landscapes & Urbanism: Changing Everything without Changing Everything)

Alexandre Chemetoff’s urban design draws on decades of designing landscapes, using new methods to reinvigorate older areas of the city and their architecture, while simultaneously proposing new buildings and neighborhoods—an innovative and unique method.

Alexandre Chemetoff’s professional trajectory and practice has veered from small to large as well as large to small. In contrast to much of the verbiage about so-called “landscape urbanism,” his work at city-scale draws on his experience designing landscapes, using new methods to reinvigorate older areas of the city and their architecture, while simultaneously proposing new buildings and neighborhoods—an innovative and unique method. Early works by his office, the Bureau des paysages, such as the internationally celebrated Garden of Bamboo at the Parc de la Villette in Paris and the Place de la Bourse in Lyon are more easily identified as beautiful landscape architecture; less easily categorized are major renewal projects such as the Île de Nantes and the creation of a new neighborhood and re-creation of an existing quarter in Nancy. While these works, products of intelligent and thoughtful design, can rightly qualify as either landscape architecture or urban design, there really is no specific term for the process that produced them.

Adopting a mode of operation intending to change everything without changing everything, designs by Chemetoff and the Bureau des paysages have eschewed any singular style. Chemetoff claims that he seeks “to construct a singular aesthetic which draws its sources from the surrounding world,” and in some projects the hand of the designer may not be at all apparent. Some design proposals have challenged governments and governmental policies with an attitude he terms “attentive disobedience,” in reference to naturalist and essayist Henry David Thoreau’s proposal of civil disobedience. The program provided or derived may be provocative, but it only poses the question. The program initiates; the designer questions; the context enriches the intensity of the enquiry and suggests an aesthetic. “There are no places abstracted from their context, places which are not inscribed in a history and a geography,” claims Chemetoff. In all, the environments created over more than forty years of practice are worthy of study and the methods employed by Chemetoff and the Bureau des paysages worthy of consideration and emulation.