Eric Lenoir
Landscape designer, author
Spring 2024
- Landscaping
- Literature
- Miami
- San Francisco
“The Residency will feed my global works that target territorial food resilience for all, reducing biodiversity collapse, urban well-being, environmental and vernacular knowledges, sustainability, and facing global warming effects.”
I was born and raised in the suburbs of Paris from the mid-1970s to the end of the century, so I was struck by the full force of urbanization and the end of France’s post-war economic boom known as the Trente Glorieuses (“The Glorious Thirty”). Mine was a period tainted with impoverishment, social crises, and concrete. Fortunate enough to find some points of comparison from hearing accounts about nature, gardens, or “green spaces,” I always had a drive to understand the dynamics of society, politics, and ecosystems. I wanted to do my bit to repair or improve our conditions for hosting living creatures—including humans—and help resolve the world’s diverse socio-environmental issues.
I thought that landscaping could be a worthwhile tool for addressing these questions, so I went to study at Ecole du Breuil-Arts et Techniques du Paysage, in Paris, where I learned the wonderful fundamentals of my trade. I also decided to distance myself from some of the practices there, deeming them harmful, and ill-adapted to the modern world and the needs of those who inhabit it. Out of militant counterculture, frenzied naturalism, a need to create, and my ultra-urban-yet-rural roots, I built an approach to landscaping and gardens. This approach is steadfastly devoted to the common good, biodiversity, resource conservation, and the fight against various forms of precarity, including the erosion of knowledge and means of resilience in a world of constant upheaval.
Eric Lenoir has authored several books, including Petit Traité du jardin punk (for which he won the St Fiacre Prize in 2019) and Le Grand Traité du jardin punk, published by Éditions Terre Vivante. In them, he defines and explores methods of demonstrating that a lack of resources, understanding, and economic means does not detract from our ability to create landscapes, improve the public space, and bring more biodiversity into our gardens.
His creations include a number of experimental gardens linked to issues of biodiversity, the common good, and knowledge transmission. He also supports various individuals at the grassroots level around questions of local food resilience and biodiversity conservation.
In partnership with
Éditions Rivages
Rivages Editions was founded in 1984, and publishes mainly fiction: French and foreign literature, thrillers and detective stories, graphic novels and fantasy/SF. For some years now, we have also been publishing humanities texts in the Bibliothèque Rivages and Petite Bibliothèque Rivages collections.