DEAN'S LECTURE SERIES
CATHERINE MOSBACH - kinetic bonds
Landscape Architect, Paris
Tuesday 5 October 2010
7.00pm - 8.00pm
Carrillo Gantner Theatre
Basement, Sidney Myer Asia Centre
The University of Melbourne
Download the lecture - Audio : Video
"The image, capable of producing the effect of strangeness, thus enacts a kind of experiment,
by showing us that things are perhaps not what they seem, that it is up to us to see them
otherwise and, through this openness, to transform them through imagination, then to make
them truly different."
- Maurice Blanchot, L’effet d’étrangeté (1957-1960), L’Entretien infini, 1969.
‘Viewing projects as a juxtaposition of documents and realities, for us they form an iconographic montage of ‘kinetic bonds’. The image that we are proposing here is more of the nature of image as material, between the fabrications that precede it and processes that extend beyond it. Its visibility requires that the interwoven layers of several time-spans be shown: the short-span of production which threads and commands the taking of form; and the long-span of accumulation which transforms everything even as it perpetrates its memory.’ This philosophy underpins Catherine Mosbach’s approach to landscape design.
Catherine Mosbach is an internationally renowned landscape architect who has operated her own practice in Paris since 1987 and produced unique landscapes in Monaco, the USA, Canada, China, Israel, and Vietnam, as well as her native France.
After gaining a degree in natural and life sciences from the Louis Pasteur University in Strasbourg, Catherine entered the prestigious Graduate School at the National School of Landscape in Versailles, where she obtained a Landscape Architecture Diploma in 1987. Catherine soon received national recognition for her commissions of neighbourhood public spaces, including a Trophy of Landscape from the French Ministry of Environment for the outer spaces of ‘Group E. Dolet’ in Issy-les-Moulineaux. Discrete projects such as this allowed her to play with details in her residential work.
Co-editor of the magazine Pages Paysages - a publication she co-founded in 1987 with Marc Claramunt, Pascale Jacotot and Tricaud Vincent – Catherine has written and published widely on landscape architecture. Pages Paysages created a forum for interdisciplinary discussions with various design professionals and guided her own design aesthetic and thinking. Catherine went on to study history and civilization at the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris in 1990, nourishing the experimental frame of her design activity.
The spectacular Botanical Garden of Bordeaux, created between 2000 and 2007, projected Catherine on to the international scene. She was awarded the Rosa Barba European Landscape Prize at the 3rd European Biennale of Landscape in Barcelona, in 2003, for this project, and it featured in the exhibition
Constructing the Contemporary Landscape Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in 2005.
Other significant projects include:
- Saint Denis Canal Promenade in Paris
- Grands Moulins Gardens in Paris
- Seine Banks in Courbevoie
- Museum Park Louvre in Lens
- Rooftop Garden MCA in Denver, USA
- The Other Bank in Quebec, Canada
- Thu Thiem New Urban Area in Saïgon, Vietnam
- Wind Sock in Batyam, Israel
- Republic Plazza in Paris
- Spot 5 in XI’an, China
- Urban Project Matelot’s District in Versailles
In this lecture entitled kinetic bonds, the final in the Dean’s Lecture Series for 2010, Catherine will present a visual survey of her work and discuss her unique design vision and practice.
To coincide with the lecture, an exhibition of selected projects by Catherine Mosbach will be on display in the Wunderlich Gallery, 4-14 October.
