Groundscapes

Groundscapes: Other Topographies
Dominique Perrault
Editions HYX, December 2016



Paperback | 6-1/4 x 9-1/2 inches | 208 pages | 265 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-2910385989 | 28 €

Publisher Description:

In this book, the architect Dominique Perrault presents his thoughts on the architecture of the "Groundscape". An idea, a concept, the architect has been exploring and experimenting with for many years in his projects and through his fictions. "It is a work on shaping reality, through subterranean architecture, where is not a question of living but of marking and carving out places for urban life in the earth, this epidermis open to the sky".

dDAB Commentary:

If there is one architect who could be best associated with buildings that merge with the land, or "landscrapers" (as in the title of the 2002 book by Aaron Betsky), or "groundscapes," or whatever one wants to label them, it's Dominique Perrault. His French National Library from 1989 placed a sunken garden at the center of four "open-book" towers; the Velodrome and Olympic Swimming Pool from ten years later depressed a circle and a square into a raised landscape; and the Ewha Womans University from 2008 featured a Michael Heizer-esque cut through two parallel wings. These projects illustrate that Perrault spends a good deal of time thinking about how buildings relate to the landscape they sit upon, how they can be cut into the earth, and how buildings and landscapes can, in a sense, merge. Groundscape lays out the theoretical foundations (no pun intended) for subterranean architecture.

Perrault's arguments are organized into eight chapters (Fictions, Archi-tectonics, Geographic Extension, The Generic Void, Transition Zones, Logics of Density, Ontologies of the Ground, and The Urban Substance), each organized as text followed by images. The texts ("the fruits of exchanges and interviews with Frédéric Migayrou") are dense, often times hard to decipher. I chalk this up partly to the text being theoretical and full of pronouncements free of any necessary support, but I think the translation from French to English is also to blame. There are enough instances of poor punctuation, odd phrasing, and run-on sentences to make me think otherwise. The images, on the other hand, are a treat, ranging from Perrault's own projects to artworks to photographs of subterranean spaces most people will never venture into. But why separate the words and images? Why not integrate the two, allowing the images to clarify and carry along the theoretical text? Groundscapes would have made a much stronger argument if such an editorial approach were taken.

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Author Bio:

Born in 1953 in Clermont-Ferrand, Dominique Perrault studied in Paris and received his diploma as an architect from the École des Beaux-Arts in 1978. He created his own firm in 1981 in Paris.

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