May 31. I arrive fifteen minutes before the start of the first lecture at Krasny Oktyabr - a hefty lock wrapped in a plastic bag hangs on the door of the club, next to it is a white and blue poster with the inscription "Lectures", which, taking into account the circumstances, is perceived as a mockery … that's all. What to do? Well, okay, I think the lecturer is probably late, but he will come back soon. I stood five minutes, ten … About fifteen people had already accumulated near the unfortunate door with a lock - and everyone asked each other: "Will the lecture be at least in some form today?" It soon became clear that there was no point in waiting, and the people dispersed.
The next day it turned out that there is some other program "Arch of Moscow" besides the official one, printed on A4 paper, which indicates that the lectures of M. Devin and Ch. Dzukki will take place on Friday, June 1. And then this information turned out to be only half true. After Michel Devin, no Chino Dzukki ever spoke - the very next day, June 2, when I was at G. Pesce's lecture at the Central House of Artists, someone whispered to me that Chino Dzukki had been postponed for today: drive up, they say, if you like, by nine o'clock to the Red October club …
As for M. Devin, I will start with the fact that he is a very famous landscape architect who collaborated during his career with such people as J. Nouvel, J. Herzog and P. de Meuron, N. Foster, etc. and designed park ensembles in several metropolitan areas (London, Paris, Tokyo, Dallas). Before embarking on a further analysis of the work of M. Devin, I confess that until now I was somehow not particularly interested in the topic of landscape architecture: I kept concentrating on houses, but about trees and bushes I thought that, they say, anyone could plant them beautifully. will manage. Of course, I have always paid tribute to gardening art - especially the old, two hundred or three hundred years ago. Yes, and from the modern I have something in my head - well, take at least the park La Villette B. Chumi. But in order to purposefully study this issue, down to the details - I was never drawn to such a thing. And here - here, the most curious material! This lecture, without exaggeration, radically changed my attitude to such a section of architecture as landscaping.
Michel Devigne spoke very quietly and slowly, as if even a little uncertain, and scrolled through the pictures quickly - probably out of excessive modesty. In general, he gave the impression of a very benevolent and calm person - it was a pleasure to listen to him … And then, when English is spoken with a French accent, it acts - well, at least for me - somehow "enveloping" (despite the fact that French as that I hate). True, the smooth, restrained speech of M. Devin periodically stumbled over the coquettish-raspy voice of the translator - a languid and asthenic youth - which introduced a tangible dissonance into what was happening. But nothing. But the translation itself was quite literate and intelligible - some fragments of the lecture would have been completely impossible to comprehend without it. So "there is a silver lining" …
M. Devin expressed his creative credo in the following thesis:
“A landscape architect should not be ashamed of the“artificiality”of his brainchild … He can design plantings in any way - using a square module, triangular, etc. - strict geometry is not an enemy in this case. Nature will do its job anyway - it has its own ways of making adjustments to the formation of the landscape that are beyond our control."
Indeed, he is absolutely sincere - as it turned out, his words really fit with the deed.
Consider one of the first projects he demonstrated - the improvement of the embankment in Antwerp: his trees are planted along the embankment not with a ruler - as, in my opinion, it is customary to do - but with rectangles 4 by 6 meters, in which everything is so densely packed that the vegetation gives the impression of architecture (from afar, anyway) … These rectangular islets M. Devin affectionately calls "pixels". In fact, such islands are found in many of his works - and at a lecture he looked at each of them for a long time and piercingly and then, addressing the audience, with tenderness and a little shamefacedly said: "These are pixels … well, almost they are."It seems to me that the idea of dividing the territory allocated for the park into an uneven grid and filling half of the resulting rectangles with greenery, and the other half with asphalt or tiles, is quite original. On the plan, it looks like a bitmap (this is when the picture is decomposed into many micro-bar elements - for example, dots) - hence, obviously, the comparison with pixels. Only the word "pixel" itself is already so worn out in relation to art that I really want to replace it with something … What analogs of raster graphics can be found in high art? The first thing that comes to mind is the divisionist (or pointillist, neo-impressionist) painting by P. Signac, J. Seurat and others of the late 19th century. It seems to me that a comparison with the work of such people sounds much more noble than a comparison with a pixel … doesn't it? Based on all of the above, I will allow myself to call M. Devin's style “landscape divisionism”.
Let's take another of his projects for Paris: on the Seine River between Quai de Stalingrad (Stalingrad embankment) and Chemin de Halage there is a small banana-shaped island of Ile Seguin, which was previously built up with industrial buildings - it was there that the city authorities decided to grow gardens. A powerful concrete (or reinforced concrete, I don’t know for sure) foundation with a bunch of all kinds of passages and dark nooks, which fills almost the entire area of the island, remained from the waterway. M. Devin was so delighted with the sight of this "concrete island", cold and lifeless, that he decided to leave everything as it is and only in some places to season the dull gray massif with greenery. It turned out the following: trees stick out from holes in the foundation, thickly, thickly, everything else is a walking area lined with concrete slabs. The question immediately arises: what if the children play and fall into one of these green holes, then what? Okay though, there are always high fences and parents for that. But the likelihood of such an incident is still possible …
The project has not yet been implemented, and, according to the author, most likely, it will remain on paper for the next thirty to forty years - this is primarily due to irregular funding.
By the way, the technique when the trees seem to make their way through the thickness of concrete, that is, they are very deep in relation to the elevation of the walking area - so that one crown crawls out to the surface, was used by M. Devin in several other projects, such as: landscaping downtown Dallas, between Woodland Rodgers Fwy and N Central Expy; and also in the French city of Strasbourg. In the first, he did it in a particularly ingenious way: there is an underground garage hidden under the square; and through these very burials with trees there are ramps at different levels. Thus, while you are looking for a free space or exit in the garage, tree trunks periodically flash in the car window - and the illusion arises that you are driving through the forest.
In the last two projects shown at the lecture, there was already much less play with space and more texture. The first is a kindergarten at Keio University in Tokyo. Everything is laid with concrete slabs - about half a meter by half a meter - some of them have round holes cut, some have a larger diameter, some have less. Young trees stick out from under the slabs with holes of the largest diameter, from under those with barely perceptible holes - blades of grass. In some places, instead of large holes from the slabs, a kind of concrete hemp of the same diameter is extruded … Well, here you can forget about associations with pointillism - this is pure architectural op-art, Victor Vasarely in stone. You can, of course, say that op-art is almost the same neo-impressionism, with the only difference that there are larger dots in it. But it will be primitive and shallow. But you need to deeply …
The second project is a park that belongs to Walker Art Center, located in the American city of Minneapolis. First M. Devin very solemnly spoke about how he admires the American grid urban planning system (which is actually not originally American, but ancient Greek - the Hippodamian grid). And then he added how great it can be if you put something curving on top of such a rigid structure as a grid, similar to the images of cyclones in the weather news. He clicked the remote control from his laptop, and the following picture appeared on the screen: on a black background with red lines, a square grid was drawn, in the cells of which were inscribed no less square - in contour lines - houses; and to the right of these houses is a park with the promised crooked streets and clusters of trees in the form of clouds or patches of handkerchiefs. After the master plan, he showed photographs of concrete slabs that lined the pedestrian streets - in each of them holes of various shapes and sizes were made (again op-art). The technology of making such holes is more than curious: first, a special stencil is made (in their case, it was, it seems, a copper plate), then it is applied to the concrete that has not yet hardened, and a special device is rolled over it, which issues water from its "abdomen" under a very strong pressure - and here's a pattern of dots, rhombuses and commas.
One lady asked about this a purely feminine question: “What if heels get stuck in these holes”? Michel Devigne quickly found out: "So don't wear them."
