Trame resistenti/Resisting patterns

The challenge to face appeared hard: the developing of a new eco-district in Nantes seemed to prefigure the disappearing of a former residual agricultural landscape, included between the XIX centuries boulevards and the suburban fringes. But, in this case, the landscape project achieved by Anne-Sylvie Bruel e Christophe Delmar, simultaneously with the urban design conceived by the town planners, marked the difference. Since their earliest works, Bruel and Delmar tuned their project approach to the reading and reinterpreting of patterns and structures featuring the historical landscape, strengthening the palimpsest by the application of a contemporary design. The project site in Nantes has a particularly rich historical and geological depth, conserving memories and clues of its past: the former agricultural parceling emerged from the periurban friches, as a legible pattern, highlighted by a framework of grey schist walls. Thus, the design of the eco-district arrangement came from the inventive conservation of this previous layers, to create a new landscape configuration.