BY DESIGN
ON THE ROOFTOPS OF PARIS, A NEW KIND OF URBAN GARDEN
Ø
The
landscape architect ARNAUD CASAUS is creating green spaces wilder and warmer
than those found at street level.
Access RAS 2019-12-06
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PHOTO 01: A
rooftop garden on Paris’s Rue Vieille du Temple that Arnaud Casaus designed,
featuring narrow-leaved mock privet, African lily, rosemary, Mediterranean
spurge and Verbena bonariensis, among other plants. The Willy Guhl chairs are
vintage.Credit...Marion Berrin
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- STARING OUT OVER
the banister from the rooftop terrace of an eighth-floor penthouse on the
Marais’s Rue Vieille du Temple,
it’s immediately clear you’re in Paris: Across the park below, past the
mansard roofs of the low Haussmannian buildings that have fronted these
streets since the late 19th century, the Eiffel Tower and the Place de la
Bastille’s column pierce the gray clouds in the middle distance and,
looking west, the cyan blue and cherry-red tubes of the Centre Pompidou
dominate the skyline, their chromatic hues clashing against the beige
city.
- These are pleasant, familiar views — but if you turn back
toward the private terrace’s adjoined apartment (which is owned by a
television producer), you’ll spot the roof’s true focal point: a dense
thicket of plants, grounded in weathered terra-cotta pots, layered with
such variety and quantity as to completely shroud the walls and corners of
this 754-square-foot deck.
- The verdant,
V-shaped tableau, as absorbing as it is disorienting in this metropolitan
context, evokes the fantasy of being a parched desert traveler stumbling
across a fecund oasis. This
sense of sudden displacement is further echoed by the plants themselves,
nearly none of which technically belong in Paris: Among the dozens of
varieties, there’s Agave x nigra, a hardy desert succulent; Phillyrea
angustifolia, a silvery-leafed bush native to the Mediterranean region;
and Aristaloe aristata, squat and spiky, which hails from South Africa.
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PHOTO 02: CASAUS amid the Mexican feather grass at the Rue Vieille du Temple garden.Credit...Marion
Berrin
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PHOTO 03: His own terrace, planted with Guernsey lily, society garlic,
Hardenbergia violacea, star jasmine, red yucca, ghost plant, garden thyme,
common sage and more.
Credit...Marion
Berrin
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7. Much in the way
that contemporary chefs focus on mixing international influences,
supporting small-batch growers, heralding hyper-seasonality and colliding
several historical and regional references at once, CASAUS is among a group of landscape architects — including DANIEL NOLAN in San
Francisco, GIANMATTEO MALCHIODI in Parma, Italy,
and RICK ECKERSLEY in
Melbourne, Australia — who are redefining their craft largely by ignoring
its traditions, choosing instead to create bountiful juxtapositions in
unexpected settings.
8. His work
dovetails with a larger green
movement underway in Paris, where, since
2014, the city has been installing dozens of tiny, idiosyncratic public
gardens; in 2015, Mayor ANNE HIDALGO announced an
initiative, permis
de végétaliser (“license to vegetate”), that
provides permits and tools to help residents (or their landscapers)
develop their own urban plots, with a goal of adding 247 acres of vertical
and roof gardens throughout Paris by next year.
9. For CASAUS, this often involves
stacking visually distinct levels of, say, prickly cactuses and wispy
flowering bushes, or branchy ornamental trees and soft grasses, against a
balustrade or facade.
10. He
prefers to work in tight quarters not only because those are what tend to
be available in the city but also because it allows him to distill and
compound his contrast-driven vision.
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PHOTO 04: The plant-shrouded dining area of the Rue Vieille du Temple garden.Credit...Marion
Berrin
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- CASAUS’S profile may have
risen with the city’s green wave, but his peripatetic style remains
indebted to his itinerant past: Born a few hours southeast of Paris, in
the Burgundy countryside of Dijon, his earliest memories are of tilling
his grandfather’s enormous vegetable garden and eating its tomatoes.
- It was then, at the
age of 6, that he knew he “would always work within nature,” he recalls,
and when it came time to go to college, he chose instead to enroll in
landscape school in the South of France. He never completed his studies, opting to spend two and a
half years in the late ’90s in Lebanon, where he learned to cultivate and
propagate local plants. In 2000, he headed to Morocco to establish his own
nursery with a former classmate; a year later, he returned to France,
where he met his boyfriend, Jerome, a lawyer, and decided to stay in
Paris.
- A few years
later, he befriended KARL FOURNIER and OLIVIER
MARTY of the then-rising architecture firm Studio KO,
who shared the same cactus-and-desert-infused North African aesthetic that
CASAUS had spent his 20s
perfecting.
- As the duo won
acclaim for their minimalist villas, hotels and museums, CASAUS served as something like
their in-house landscape architect:
Ø In 2015, for FOURNIER and MARTY’s own home in Corsica, he planted an Egyptian palm tree in a
field overgrown with wildflowers and created a split-reed pergola studded with
jasmine and wisteria;
Ø in 2017, at a
Berber-style lodge that Studio KO
helped build in Marrakesh, CASAUS set
a pair of Agave scabra incongruously into a lawn of wild, waist-high grass,
their pointed leaves poking through like errant rabbits’ ears; and
Ø last year, at the
hillside Los Angeles estate of
the creative director RICHARD
CHRISTIANSEN, he installed a classical tiered garden of agave, plumeria and
a dozen different types of basil.
PHOTO 05: The
glass doors that lead from Casaus’s apartment into his outdoor space. Credit...Marion
Berrin
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- When he began
collaborating with FOURNIER and
MARTY, CASAUS would often seek out a regional nursery that could
educate him on the local climate, soil and vegetation. He still prefers to do that when he
takes on a project in a new locale.
- But the more he traveled,
the more he realized that his options were more flexible than he once
assumed: What thrives in Kyoto, say, or Hong Kong or Tangier or Oaxaca or
even Southern California, might flourish just as well on one of his
Parisian roof terraces, which tend to be exposed to high sun and yet
partially shaded and protected from the wind, and thus hospitable to
equatorial, Mediterranean and Eastern flora.
- That revelation
changed his thinking about landscape architecture, a discipline that’s
influenced by increasing globalization — but also by the unignorable
realities of climate science: “The weather is changing,” he
says. “I can see that.” Over the last two decades in Paris, the
winter temperatures have risen, allowing him to cultivate, say, Mexican
feather grass sooner than he could have in the past.
- So long as he
has this opportunity, CASAUS believes
it’s both his mission and right to reimagine what a rooftop garden might
be. (Greenery, after all, is one salve against global warming.)
- This is perhaps
most evident in one of his ongoing Parisian projects: his own terrace,
just 108 square feet, accessible through a glass door in the kitchen of
his fifth-floor apartment on Rue
d’Aboukir in the Second Arrondissement.
- Out here, the
city beyond is all but invisible, blocked by an unceasing canopy comprising
a veritable United Nations of horticulture: Akebia quinata — or chocolate
vine — native to Japan, China and Korea; red yucca, from the Chihuahuan
Desert in West Texas; Tulbaghia violacea (so-called society garlic)
imported from South Africa; and common sage, which grows throughout the
Mediterranean, nestled amid myriad other flowering plants that tangle
together to form the purest representation of his democratic ethos.
- On hot summer
nights — of which there are increasingly many in Paris — CASAUS and his boyfriend pull their futon from
its living-room frame and drag it outside to the wood decking near a cafe
table, the balcony’s only permanent furniture. And then they drift asleep to the sound
of the streets below and the bees buzzing overhead, hidden in a forest all
their own.
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