14. Retour aux racines

Giulia Pignocchi and Julien Truglas are Franco-Italian landscape architects who are passionate about the relationship between art and nature. They are both avid explorers and their travels around the world have helped shape their socially-engaged outlooks. One of the most significant trips for them as landscape architects was a four-month trip on a sailing boat from Madagascar to Brazil, via the Cape of Good Hope. During this exploration in the southern hemisphere, they were faced with very different outlooks on the world, ecological challenges, the lyricism of nature and human solidarity. When they returned, they felt strongly about the environmental and social responsibilities they had as architects. Giulia Pignocchi is an architecture graduate from Sapienza University of Rome and Julien Truglas studied at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture et de Paysage in Lille. Together in 2014, they founded MA Paysage. Their speciality is to revive abandoned areas through garden art, ecological urban planning and public participation. The projects they have led with this in mind range from small to large-scale ventures: on-site art from the Pink Granite Coast in Brittany to the Italian shores of Lake Como, public and private food-producing gardens, eco-friendly gardens with rainwater collection solutions, planting plans that nurture biodiversity for company building permits, planning permits for eco-districts, participatory development projects for metropolises and rural towns, and landscaped grounds such as the 50 hectares for the Sultan of Oman at the Domaine de Montjay. Alongside their work as landscape designers, they also founded the MA laboratory in 2017, which is an association devoted to raising awareness for environmental issues through on-site activities. In 2019, they organised the first Manifestation d’Architecture du Paysage landscape architecture event in various cultural venues across Lille. They co-founded Lisière(s), an award-winning association for the management and development of the Jardin Écologique de Lille, and between 2015 and 2020, worked on this urban ecology and public participation project. For five years, they were the landscape architects in charge of the landscape design and development of the cultural programme and brought together a group of residents to manage the 2.5-hectare urban forest on the Vauban fortifications. Thanks to this extensive experience, they decided to do the same in a 10-hectare valley in Sardinia. To do so, they created an Italian farming company and are preparing to open the very first Mediterranean GardenLab in 2021.