The “Earth star” is a sculpture-landscape installed in the garden of the French Embassy in Haiti, in Port-au-Prince. The work of successive developments with the engineer Pompidou Dorval and his Haitian teams have resulted in this “magical work”, living form lurking in the field.

Art, landscape, architecture – Since André Le Nôtre, French landscape architects have been trying to build garden architecture as carefully as architects wear to buildings. Art has been integrated into both, with, for example, statuary or sculptural boundaries. By choosing to invest the soil of the entrance sequence, the artistic project is part of a tradition of art in gardens and manifested in a French spirit: readable and clear compositions, scheduling able to co-exist in a mutual benefit architecture, landscape and works of art.

Haiti, inspiring forms – A selection of forms of the Haitian landscape serve as a plastic matrix. Geographical figures or plant typologies of Haiti are a formal vocabulary of inspiration for the work. The coastlines, the tree structures of the mangrove roots or the forms of the Caribbean Echinoderms draw a plastic anchor to be reinterpreted by the artistic project. Among the profusion of Haitian forms, Gilles Brusset has retained the family of the outline of things, the border of the surfaces, the design of the edges. Often the forms stretch out and extend in bypasses, flaring out in prolific excrescences.

Project Data – “Etoile de terre” (Earth star)

Landscape Architecture: paysarchitectures

Project location: Haiti

Year completed: 2018

Photo credits: Gilles Brusset and Valérie Baeriswyl and Michel Denancé