The quarries of Crazannes: Bernard Lassus's landscape approach to cultural diversity

摘要

Bernard Lassus' approach to landscape design confronts issues of cultural diversity and institutional domination in a public space. It stems from an awareness of cultural differences that are brought into play by the creation of a motorway in contemporary France. Its presentation calls upon a few preliminary remarks about cultural differences and about public space. We need not map cultural differences onto demographic descriptions of a society: one person may belong to several cultures, and may shuttle between them, renegotiating self-identity within each. Thus cultural differences need not necessarily pit one group of people against another. Moreover, we can see that some places imply a culture of their own: institutional settings such as schools, churches and hospitals are well known in this respect. They foster the acquisition of a special culture among their members; and, very often a significantly different one for people who occupy different positions in the institutional setting: teachersand pupils, priests and parishioners, doctors and nurses, for instance. So we can see places as much as social groups as the breeding grounds of cultural differences.