15. Cupidon s’en fout
Out of embarrassment, we explain to children that they were born among the roses or cabbages, depending on whether they are girls or boys.
The garden is where they access the secret of life. They observe plants and insects there and thus quickly discover, it has to be admitted, the hidden treasure.
As they grow up, from one adventure to another, they find out that there are a succession of truths one after the other, that these truths are also complementary and build our intimate convictions. Sometimes an intuition appears in the heart of our Cartesian certainties and is enough to call everything into question, from our conception of the Universe to the flights of Cupid’s arrows.
Under these conditions, even our conception of Space and Time is no longer the same. Searching for other truths, we throw ourselves, body and soul, into the adventure with a new taste in our mouths, intoxicated by a unique scent, and replete with an obsessive dream. In passion, the body obeys the finger and the eye…It gets on board and casts off the mooring lines that consciousness was holding on to up until then.
DESIGNERS
Didier Courant is an architect and town planner, with a portfolio including different projects in a wide variety of fields (educational institutions, shopping centres, collective dwellings, cultural buildings, etc.). In each of his projects, this architect has always had the will and the curiosity to have a landscape architect’s approach; by taking into account both the scale of the site and well thought out landscape stances. He worked as a freelance professional from 1980 to December 2005, before creating the limited company “ADC” in January 2006. This change of structure was justified by the company’s commitment to responding at all times to its Customers’ expectations and requirements to the best of their ability. Didier Courant is the manager of the firm of architects and also runs an integrated technical design office: SOGIBAP, a company that does studies for Town Planning, Landscape Architecture, Roads and Services and Construction Economics. Until 2007, he was also Chairman of the Associations of Architects in Ile de France. This position enabled him to be constantly in touch with the public authorities.
Gilles Pujol was born in 1960. He is a French urban engineer and a third-year Architecture student at the “ESA” [Higher Institute for Architecture]. He is the General Manager of the technical department of the town of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, General Manager of a joint Association, an ERDF and GRDF [French electricity and gas distribution networks] licensing authority and a member of the board of the Essonne League against Cancer. “I have an irrational need to build, to create, to invent. Public space is my professional playing field. Space in general is my personal playing field.” Second in the 2003 world slot racing championships in England, French Soapbox Champion in 2007 and holder of 9 world speed records on the salt lake in the USA in 2008 and 2009, with his team the “Triplettes de Bonneville”.
Philipp Robert is a visual artist and video-maker, who is now in charge of exhibitions for the Cultural Department of the town of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois. He was born in 1961 and studied at the Fine Arts Institutes in Poitiers and Aix-en-Provence for 5 years, obtaining the National Higher Level Diploma for Visual Arts Expression with merit in 1985. Since then, he has been creating huge wind pendulums and transient machines. He brings together technologies and natural phenomena and is involved in many exhibitions. He is interested in the Living and in transient architecture and considers everything in our Universe to be raw material. His installations bring our perception of Space and Time into play. Until 2002, he did architectural designs for major groups like the National Centre for Space Studies and Renault Industrial Vehicles, in the context of international fairs in Paris and all over the world: Amsterdam, Hanover, Washington, Montreal, Singapore, Peking, etc.
Ronan Séné is a government-approved landscape architect with a diploma from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure du Paysage [National Higher Institute for Landscape] in Versailles in 2005. He is currently working as a landscape architecture project manager in the landscape architecture and town planning agency, SOGIBAP, based in Longjumeau in Essonne. The agency designs a variety of projects, ranging from plant support for educational establishments and for facilities open to the general public (shopping centres, community halls, theatres) to integration into the landscape of road structures on public and historic sites.
Yann Bruneau is a 37-year-old town planner with a diploma from the French Institute for Town Planners and the CESA [Centre for Development and Town Planning Studies] in Tours. He has been involved with coordinating urban projects for a dozen or so years. He has been passionate about methods of public involvement in major units of social housing over the last thirty years, and about environmental policy. He is sustained by a large number of projects, insomuch as they all constitute an opportunity for discovery: long-haul traveller, climber, solitary walker at altitude, but also French Soapbox Champion in 2007 and holder of 9 world speed records on the salt lake in the USA in 2008 and 2009, with his team the “Triplettes de Bonneville”.
