Bercy's “Jardin de la Mémoire”: Landscape as a Language of Memory

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Notes

Notes

1.  Marylène Ferrand, Jean-Pierre Feugas, and Bernard Leroy and the landscape architects Philippe Raguin and Ian Lecaisne comprised the design team.

2.  Landscape architect Bernard Lassus’ Jardin des retours at Rochefort-sur-mer (1982) and his project to restore the Tuileries gardens (1990) are further examples of park design that interrogates memory and history.

3.  In order to better focus on the park design, I will not discuss these diverse elements of the neighborhood's development, nor will I discuss the many programmed, pedagogical and cultural activities within and around the park.

4.  The Marché Saint Germain is a Napoleon-era covered market in the Seventh Arrondissement (Jones 252)

5.  Although several rows of warehouses at the southeast edge of the park are now restored and house the Cour Saint-Emilion open-air shopping mall, a Musée des arts forains, a Salon de Venise, and the municipal school of bakery and pastry, these preserved traces of the past are not currently organized, labeled, or used in a manner that allow a visitor to gather a coherent knowledge of the site's history.

6.  When the Bercy redevelopment was announced, articles in Le Monde and in architecture journals blossomed with the argot of the pinardiers—wine dealers—among their chais—the wine and liquor warehouses (see Champenois; Pousse, “Vitalité”). These mildly nostalgic articles participate in the dilation and transformation of the concept of patrimoine observed by Nora (but also by Alois Riegl) from historical value to age-value, marking the passage of time (Nora 1992 1001).

7.  The winning design was the only one of the ten competition finalists to incorporate both alignments throughout the park.

8.  I therefore disagree with Didier Rebois’ assertion in Architecture d’aujourd’hui that the Parc de Bercy's local, idiosyncratic street pattern resists the APUR's efforts to unify and cohere all of Paris's East Side.

9.  As the art theorist Rosalind Krauss notes in her essay on “The Grid,” the presence, in abstract art, of a grid that does not match up to the boundaries of a painting implies, among other things, a larger virtual surface or world; one looks at this surface through the “window” created by the painting, or in this case, the pathways in the park.