Between memory and hope landscape as space-time-construct

„Think global, act local“. This famous motto of the environmentally conscious might find its temporal translation in what Marcel Proust wrote almost a century ago: „We should think as if we were eternal, and work as if we were to die tomorrow.“

Notwithstanding the fact that those propositions could be reversed without losing much of their pertinence, we might venture the idea that the major task facing us today is to give more time to space and more space to time. But isn’t this, by the way, what architecture and landscape architecture have always been about?

Our intention, in this lecture, will be to explore some of the aspects and consequences of this idea and to promote a conception of (landscape) architecture as both an art of memory and an art of hope, applied to making our present thicker, more spacious, more substantial, and therefore more habitable. A way of combining Hans Jonas’s Principle Responsibility with Ernst Bloch’s Principle Hope, by giving a new resonance to what Karl Marx once said to his French translator: “It is in the very fact that our situation is hopeless that I find reasons for hoping.”

Sébastien Marot
1961, trained as a philosopher, is a critic and historian in architecture and landscape design. Animator of the Tribune d‘histoire et d‘actualité de l‘architecture between 1987 and 2002 at the Société Française des Architectes in Paris, he was then the founder and chief editor of the French journal Le Visiteur from 1995 to 2003.

Presently a professor in theory and history at the École d‘architecture de la ville et des territoires in Marne La Vallée, and a guest professor at the chair of Landscape Architecture at the ETH in Zürich, Marot has also taught as a visiting critic in several schools across Europe (Architectural Association in London, IAUG Geneva, École du Paysage de Versailles...) and North America (GSD Harvard, UPENN School of Design, Cornell University, University of Montreal).

Marot‘s researches and writings have been mostly devoted to the issues of site and space-time in landscape architecture and Urbanism (cf. Sub-Urbanism and the Art of Memory, AA Publications, London 2003), and he is currently preparing the publication of his PhD: Palimpsestuous Ithaca, A Relative Manifesto for Sub-Urbanism. In the last years, his teaching and lectures have progressively focused on the history of environmental issues and on what he calls the “art of hope” in contemporary design.