Le Passage Végétal Lausanne

Light installation in an underground passage

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Lausanne Jardins 2019 – Le Passage Végétal

Le Passage Végétal competition entry got awarded and the project is executed in June 2019. The underpass installation is part of Lausanne Jardins, a cultural event that combines landscaping with reflections on the city.

The project strives to enhance the urban quality of Lausanne’s city center by highlighting the positive features of one of the most unpopular urban places: the underpass. Depriving nearly all of the senses, on first glance a “tunnel” may act as the antithesis of garden. But this extreme condition, repeated across cities worldwide, presents the opportunity to rethink contemporary garden culture: What type of garden would be suitable for this truly inert urban environment? This underground pavilion is experienced through a play of light and shadow caused by the interplay of the projected geometric patterns and the boundless floral motif representing the hybrid garden beyond. The plant that the floral motif represents is Marrubium vulgare or horehound, a medicinal herb. It is one of two wild flowering plants which was recently selected to be preserved by Lausanne’s botanical garden. Visitors walking through the passage are bathed in a dappled light of shifting shadow projects as they pass between a wall of increasingly stylized Marrubium vulgare on one side and a perforated screen displaying a corresponding geometric pattern on the other. The gradual abstraction of the floral motif, which slowly enlarges the white floral crown of the shrubby horehound not only continues in a long tradition of floral ornament but is also intended to demonstrate to visitors the delicate beauty that can be found in urban vegetation with close examination.
Visitors to the Le Passage Végétal are first met by a field of planted wildflowers at the two points where the tunnel meets the street. A pop-up tea service is occasionally offered in the pavilion. Therefore furniture designed specifically for the pavilion is taken out of the storage space and set up at the center of the underpass along with a simple tea service designed to allow visitors to pause for a few minutes to enjoy a refreshment in the cool and calm space.

More info:

www.passage-vegetal.ch