L’enfance du pli
The Fold’s childhood is a sculpture-landscape, monumental and elongated in the land of the place called Boudines. It takes part to a surface of soil of 2200m². Its forms are an interpretation of the force that spawned landscapes of the Jura massif (Jura folds).
Meeting of 2 formal systems: In the orthogonal landscape of Meyrin-park and near the flat facades of the École des Boudines, sculpture-landscape emerges in curves and volumes. It is a response to the principle of tabula rasa, to the deliberate ignorance of the pre-existing landscape that presided over the realization of Meyrin-park. Within the modern "radical" city, the artistic project inscribes a set of differentiated forms, extraordinary in the context of the orthonormal city.
The return of the topographical plot: The formal system of sculpture freely develops its dynamic undulations in the ground of the exterior spaces of the École des Boudines, freed from the relentless formal system of the straight lines of Meyrin-park.
Games of space and time: From the heights, one can see the Fold’s childhood as a picture evocative of the folded and undulating landscapes of the Jura, a model imaginary site of the mountains lying. It is a set of shapes that can also be traveled, paced. The spatiality of the fold offers the children a physical experience of the curve and a variety of situation differentiated in the space of the pleated floor. From the near to the far, from the fold of the curve to the stretched line of the architectural horizon, the bodies and the eyes of the children find articulations, enter into a new relation with the immensity of the sky of MEYRIN-PARC, Beyond the valley of Geneva and the massifs of the Jura
Spatiality of folding = Landscape of childhood: "L'enfance du pli" is a monumental sculpture which is also an ideal model of the topography of the Jura massifs (folded relief). The succession of slopes, hills and valleys, the interfaces between the mineral soil and the vegetal soil, the runoff paths are all notions of geography rendered apprehensible by means of their plastic expression. Sculpture-landscape produces a crisscross spatiality that offers children a sensitive pedagogy, a physical experience of the curve and a variety of situations differentiated in the space of the pleated ground. The series of hills and curvatures outline an enveloping horizon. The topography in which the children evolve gives a tangible reading of the space thanks to the altimetric landmarks and lines of horizons at their height (40 to 140 cm) drawn by the soft emergence of the shapes of the folded hills. The levels of their crest lines give young children benchmarks of heights to measure themselves against the space as they grow. The classic elements of games, furniture, sandboxes, grassed land movements or flexible soil are replaced by the imaginary geography of sculpture-landscape. In a broad movement, it unifies the variety of children's games.
Art and landscape - The fold’s childhood is a work of art carved in the field of Meyrin-park. Located between the park and the buildings, between architecture and landscape, it questions the status of art in public space and landscape as a work of art. Designed with the tools of the landscape architect, the work implicitly poses the question of the part of creation that can involve the profession of l landscape architect. Is the landscape architect an artist?
The nature of the commands does not automatically imply the design of a space under the sky - arrangement - as an act of creation. The double status of Gilles Brusset, directing a landscape agency as a parallel of his artistic activity, makes it possible to conceive the conception of landscapes as acts of creation and the conception of works of art as landscapes.
Gilles Brusset, 2017
