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manon mollard
Inter 2

My project offers a reflection on the relationship between Man and Nature by blurring the boundary between house and garden.

The Victorian house at 24 Gilston Road is understood as a series of fragments, both walls and volumes,  which can be spatially reconfigured in order to open up zones for vegetation. In addition to the (domestic) garden, medicinal plants are cultivated by the occupier, a gardener, to provide the neighbourhood with herbs to cure skin diseases.

As the vegetation keeps growing, the division between built and natural environments becomes harder to define. Ivy grows into wall cracks, aerial roots reach the ground to take on structural roles to support the building, greatly changing the way in which the house is inhabited, and eventually, as if architecture could have an expiry date, the building is not able to perform its initial functions.

'The world as an extension of the skin is much more interesting than the world as an extension of the image.'                     
Derrick de Kerckhove'In this marriage of ruins and springtime, the ruins have become stones again, and losing the polish imposed on them by men, 
they have reverted to nature. 
To celebrate the return of her prodigal daughters 
Nature has laid out a profusion of flowers.'
Albert Camus'It is more inspiring to think about how a building might evolve than to rigidly define how it should be used.'
Junya Ishigami'After a few steps, the smell of absinthe seizes one by the throat. 
The wormwood’s gray wool covers the ruins as far as
the eye can see. 
Its oil ferments in the heat, and the whole earth gives off a heady alcohol that makes the sky flicker.'
Albert Camus
'The task of architecture is to make visible how the world touches us.'
Merleau-Ponty