The landscape approach of Bernard Lassus: Part II
Abstract In an earlier issue of the Journal of Garden History, 3 (1983), pp. 79–107, five texts were brought together to illustrate ‘The Landscape Approach of Bernard Lassus’. These texts ranged from his first comprehensive garden design, The Garden of the Anterior (1975), to his entry for the notorious competition for the Parc de la Villette, The Garden of the Planets (1980). The great interest of these schemes, and of the three intervening projects, lay in the fact that they implied nothing less than a new poetics of landscape. Concepts like the demesurable, or ‘demeasurable’, were invoked to emphasize the supreme importance of the imagination in formulating new ideas of space. Contemporary reference points, like the landing of Apollo on the Moon, were adduced to prove the point that garden design was bound to follow the radical revision of our notions of distance and ‘wildness’ that had accompanied the arrival of an age of mass tourism and global travel.