Antoine Grumbach is an architect and town planner. This book is a reflection on metropolitan (metropolitan France, that is) land art. It gets its impetus from his awareness of the sheer volume of soil excavated by the construction & public works sector in the Île-de-France region.
Antoine Grumbach has no doubts – soil is a marvellous material. He explains all in his book entitled: « La Terre comme matériau: les Belvédères du Grand Paris ».
In the book, the architect and town planner describes the project of « made hills ». A visible sign of a symbolic ‘circular economy’, they have sprung up at the edges of the Paris metropolitan area.
ECT shares this ambition with Antoine Grumbach; the ambition of turning an « astonishing, intelligent, poetic, bold, useful » project into reality – the belvederes or lookout hills of the metropolitan area.
The sketches in the book illustrate these discoveries and explorations. The book unveils a laboratory of the imagination. They are steps to celebrate the fragility of the limits of the metropolitan area, as symbolised by these belvederes.
