Gilles Clément and Philippe Rahm

This provocative exhibition of the work of French horticultural engineer and landscape architect Gilles Clément and Swiss architect Philippe Rahm was as rigorous and elegant in tenor and scope as it was philosophically thoughtful and gripping in its implications. Both Clément and Rahm are practitioners of conscience when it comes to thinking about our convoluted relationship with the natural world. Their design practices have meta-ethical and environmentally healthy underpinnings and their researches are, as a result and particularly now, something of a clarion call.

The exhibition marks the North American debut for installations by Clément and Rahm. Most viewers may find this surprising, given the topical and pressing nature of their distinctive concepts of artificial environments and natural landscapes. We sense the imminence of change, of arriving at the threshold, of being poised on an environmental cusp. These thinkers propose nothing less than a radical perspectival shift in which it is the environment itself that is seen as the fulcrum; our demands upon it no longer enjoy primacy. In shifting emphasis and attention wholesale to the natural environment, their work is not only visionary, but also a terrifyingly effective indictment of our own institutionalized, entrenched myopia.

Gilles Clément convincingly lays out his concept of the “Third Landscape” as a paradigm shift in various media. His theory presumes Spaceship Earth to be a planetary garden. He believes the natural environment has been irreparably changed—I hazard, harmed—by accelerating human intervention. He distinguishes three kinds of spaces for the continuing development of our biodiversity: transitional, undeveloped and officially preserved natural places.

Clément is a talented prospector, and if he were prospecting for gold, there is no doubt that he would be very rich by now. Virtually everywhere he has travelled, he has recorded third landscapes— literally across the globe—and has preserved evidence of the consequences of human inhabitation or simply “passing through.” For instance, his photographs document in minute detail a French field he has been studying over time, and their evidentiary proof of his thesis is radiant.

The nexus of his contribution is The Chandelier, the exhibition’s showstopper, an exemplary installation by any standard. Hanging in chandelier-like fashion from the ceiling of the exhibition space was a vast, tiered inventory of cast acrylic teardrops, each containing an organic or inorganic specimen found at a site near the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Here was a bewildering array of human detritus and self-seeded plants Clément himself gathered on an expedition to an unused site in close proximity to the CCA. On a personal research expedition subsequent to seeing the show, I found this lost and liminal site myself. It is located on a slope and in a gully between the railroad tracks south of the CCA, the expressway “on” ramp further west, and the sculpture garden of the CCA itself, designed by artist/architect Melvin Charney in the late 1980s.

This site embodied, for Clément, the idea of the third landscape, if not necessarily a register of its true diversity. The tiered chandelier hung like a suspended child’s top that was at once prismatic and panegyric for our own lost innocence as inner-city urban dwellers; each tiny module of inert detritus was evidence of a dark cypher inserted into the natural landscape, and constituted a veritable whirligig of our leavings, both liquid and solid. Preserved like mummified relics in “precious” acrylic casts, which at first resembled transparent quartzite, the items called up endless trips to the West Island by train, commuters chucking all manner of waste helter-skelter from the windows, heedless of consequence. While this suspended reliquary contained examples of plants growing on the site, leaves and sundry insect specimens, it was the bewildering range of human leftovers that captivated the eye—and humbled the imagination—from flattened tubes of Colgate toothpaste, condoms, small bottles of Quebec maple syrup (quintessentially Canadian detritus, after all), cell phones, hypodermic needles, to Guston-like empty whisky bottles and a plethora of packaging.

I was struck by the relationship between Clément’s third landscape and Marc Augé’s “non-place.” Augé, the brilliant French anthropologist, developed “non-place” as a locale bereft of identity, history and urban relationships. The non-place is a transient space, a vast, portable parenthesis—like a banking machine, the inside of a car on the expressway, or being en route to an airport—occasions when humans inhabit places that are not. The architectonics of non-place is constituted in eddying currents of spatial flows, movements and sundry transitional zones. What of the garbage left behind on these itineraries? What of the dust that clogs the interstices? It is as though Clément slip-steams behind Augé’s non-places, finding therein his own theoretical gold dust in the excrement left behind.

Caught between a rock and a hard place—a third landscape and a non-place—humans must now cope with the lengthening shadow they have left over the natural environment, even when they inhabit vast, overwhelmingly negative portable parentheses. Clément’s scavenging brilliantly demonstrates that, though he refuses to engage in explicit critique, the traces are everywhere. This makes his criticism stronger and more feral still, as though the third landscape is a landscape with an implicit warning attached to it—even if “Intruders are not welcome,” “Trespassers will be Prosecuted” signage is not posted at its immediate limits.

Clément has designed a number of private and public parks and gardens in Europe and Asia, including the Grande Arche gardens at La Défense, 1994; Parc André Citroën, 1992, in Paris; the gardens of the Domaine de Rayol, 1988; and the Château de Blois, 1987. Presumably, his work as a gardener has made him especially sensitive to the erstwhile intrusions of human beings in the natural landscape.

Philippe Rahm, for his part, offers a take on the relationship between humans and the natural environment that is markedly different from that of his confrere Clément, but no less convincing and engaging. In fact, they enjoy a curious complementarity. Rahm is more suggestively liminal in his approach. He is attuned to the nearly invisible but still perceptible traceries of human influence on the natural environment—no less telling for all that. His architecture addresses atmospheric and environmental conditions—humidity, temperature, lighting, and so forth—and their fluctuations. He sees the environment as a living thing subject to continuing change. If Clément assumes the guise of wise gardener, Rahm assumes the guise of attentive physiologist. He offers a reading of human interaction with the environment that is markedly distinct from that of Clément, yet, in its own way, no less engaging.

His Interior Weather brilliantly develops the thesis that form and function follow climate in two adjacent spaces. Rahm presents us with an enclosed space in which humidity, temperature and light conditions are continually measured by a host of active sensors. The data is interpreted through images and narration in the proximate gallery, suggesting employment of the room based on various environmental readings. The interpretations are varied: social, functional, physiological. The data are then freely re-spooled as wholly fictional, with a wealth of possible spatial practices and social behaviours, offering possibilities of new urban and architectural forms. The interior geography birthed here is as radical as it is unforeseen.

If Rahm’s goal is to unhinge architecture from norms of function by using climatic condition as a fulcrum, Clément’s is to preserve waylaid lost “landscapes” as lasting insurance of ecological biodiversity. In the CCA exhibition, both succeed in their avowed purposes and, perhaps more importantly, sensitize the viewer to the ethics of our environmental relations.

Giovanna Borasi, CCA Curator of Contemporary Architecture, has produced a highly topical exhibition, which included original installations developed by the artists exclusively for the CCA, together with accompanying drawings, photography, projections and artefacts. The exhibition also includes a reading room with a wealth of data on the architects and an adjacent gallery of video projections of interviews with Clément and Rahm. ■

Gilles Clément and Philippe Rahm, “Environment: Approaches for Tomorrow” was exhibited at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal from October 18, 2006, to April 22, 2007.

James D. Campbell is a writer and curator based in Montreal.