Rooted in ecosystems

Eric Guibert is a gardener architect, researcher, and teacher, practicing at the boundaries between building and landscape architectures. He investigates regenerative architectures that host more equal relationships between other-than-humans and humans, and design methods that nurture the regeneration of all forms of life.

Taking a modern animist position, he researches meaningful ways of giving a voice to other-than-human lives. The mixed-methods approach is rooted in an embodied practice unfolding in a three hectares property in his native rural France where the landscape has been co-created with its ecosystems since 2005. This experience is in dialogue with a mixture of academic and literary writings combined with artistic methods (photography, drawing, diagramming…), including speculative letters written as if the authors were other-than-human beings, such as soils and trees.

The lecture will share the concepts, aesthetics, principles, and tensions that Eric defined in recent publications. A diagram will convey the range of relationships humans have with nature, and the understandings of it that have proven useful; it locates the ‘feral landscape’ approaches where a dialogue is established as ecosystems are neither fully controlled, nor wildernesses. The regenerative design methods, also developed in the Architectural Animism Design Studio at the University of Westminster and the Feral Landscape Design Studio at The Bartlett (both in London, UK), will also be covered.