Amphithéâtre Marguerite de Navarre, Site Marcelin Berthelot
Open to all
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Abstract

At the end of the 30s, garden architects in Western Europe were organizing across borders. Through world exhibitions, congresses and the Association Internationale des Architectes Jardinistes Modernistes (AIAJM) - modelled on the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) - garden and landscape professionals attempted to assert the theoretical and social position of a disparate, small-scale movement. No sooner was the AIAJM manifesto printed than the outbreak of the Second World War called into question the foundations of the Landscape International. During the Occupation, French urbanistes-paysagistes and architectes paysagistes such as Henri Pasquier, Jacques Gréber, Théo Leveau and Robert Joffet displayed their expertise in green spaces, sanitation and landscape protection, broadening their scope from the garden to the territory. Texts on forest urbanism, sports and youth, tourism, the layout of roads in the landscape and their planting align with Vichy rhetoric of a return to the land, while advocating technical and scientific modernity. Firmly rooted in tradition, André Vera took up his interwar arguments for regular style - the prerogative of French taste - and the renewal of craftsmanship to express his thinly veiled support for the National Revolution. However, these trends towards regionalism on the one hand, and planning and technology on the other, do not imply a geographical withdrawal of landscape and urban designers to occupied France, but are in fact part of a series of exchanges with their German, Belgian, Italian and American colleagues.

Speaker(s)

Dorothée Imbert

Ohio State University, Columbus

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