She designed the park for the Louvre Museum in Lens, in northern France, for which, along with Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, she received the Équerre d’argent award; she designed the Phase Shifts Park in the old Taichung airport in Taiwan, and also worked on the botanical garden in Bordeaux: Catherine Mosbach, landscape architect, has a portfolio of projects running from East to West. After founding the firm Mosbach Paysagistes in 1987, she worked on many different projects, bringing a more sensitive approach to the identity of a place, one of the merits for which she received 2016 the title of Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, the highest award granted by the French Republic, from the President of the Republic François Hollande.
Managing projects all over the world, Catherine Mosbach has been able to understand if the approach to forests is similar or different, if there are meeting points and a potential transfer of knowledge from one part of the world to another or, vice versa, if some solutions are applicable to all latitudes. She talked about this in person: “The main issue is the day-to-day relationship humans have with the landscape. Today, both in the West and in Asia, people seek to dominate everything that is not theirs. Here and elsewhere, we have proposed different types of relations with the living world, in a relationship of discovery and imagination. Whatever the cultural tradition, there is at times an exaggerated principle of hygiene when designing landscapes, maybe even picking up dead leaves – considered dirty – in a mainly woodland environment where the undergrowth is a resource full of micro-organisms that help the water to rise. The key to a change of mindset – being at ease with all that does not represent us – lies in education from early childhood, helping people to move away from anthropocentrism and respect natural cycles in a creative rather than dominating relationship.”
And again, thanks to her international experience, Catherine Mosbach proposes virtuous models, pathways and suggestions for changing tack, with a view to protecting the forests: “In our experience, initiatives are more creative in places where climatic conditions are a matter of survival, rather than in places in which comfort and economic security are more consolidated. Think, for example, of Africa, where planting strategies are in place from East to West, seeking to stop the encroaching deserts. We have to promote pan-continental and urban initiatives to raise awareness among the population of the need for appropriate relationships with and respect for the living world, as well as for human beings. Here is where urban spaces play a key role, teaching people to share resources and ‘do with’ rather than ‘do against’.”
“But it is not enough for landscape designers to work with inspired architects to create a more fertile and useful model,” Catherine Mosbach states, “we need ambitious clients who are willing to try something different, avoiding repetition and the implementation of technical decisions with no sensitive interpretation that merely fuel the opposition between nature and culture. There is no opposition: humans belong to the kingdom of nature just like plants, and forgetting this will lead us nowhere, except into that climatic chaos we are seeing everywhere.” To conclude, Mosbach proposes a positive vision that comes from her experience in Bordeaux, where the botanical garden she designed twenty years ago has exceeded all expectations in terms of a “gallery of environments” with the presence of fauna, coming very close to the concept of urban forest: “Design methods are what authorise – or not – the processes of welcoming living beings, in the broadest sense of the term, in areas that are compatible with urban environments. Scientific knowledge is sufficiently available internationally to be accessible to all professionals. But we must not forget that every country, every place has its own culture, traditions and technical challenges, so a bespoke, sensitive approach to the context must have precedence over the so-called international style.”
