Roques
Creation and production of a work of art for the International Garden Festival
Hortillonnages Amiens
Every year, up to 80,000 hectares of agricultural land is artificialized in France, this represents 20 m2 of land per second. The 300 hectares of the Hortillonnages does not escape the pressure of urbanisation and it has been whittled away despite the protection of the associations. The exhibit of the Faber workshop is entitled Roques which means a clod of earth in the Picard language. The exhibit alerts visitors on this phenomenon, which concerns all French countryside. On a shore of the Clermont lake, the architects have chosen the most commonly used item in the gardened marshes: the wooden plank. The market gardeners use it to reinforce the banks, here it is the only material used to build an angular lodge which has been completed using traditional construction methods where planks are superimposed one on another without glue, nails or screws. With its box roof mainly open to the clouds, this open space allows visitors to soak up the sky and the spirit of the place while keeping the land at the heart of this spatial composition. An abstract space with an area of 20 m2 which is the same as the area of land that is artificialized in France every second. The interior space embodies the size of the land’s disappearance, allowing everyone to understand the scale of the problem during their visit.
