Client: Le Domaine de Chaumont-sur-LoireArchitect: Camille Chevrier / Format EngineersLocation: Le Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire
Date: 2022-05-30 00:00:00 +0000 UTCTags: Timber, Community
The Edible Garden
Format Engineers SAS won a site at the 30th International Garden Competition of Chaumont sur Loire , in France, next to other great designers, landscape designers and artists from all around the world. Our proposal for the theme “Ideal Garden” is named “The Banquet”.
The banquet was composed of an elegant 50 metre long timber and steel table meandering in the space, planted with more than 300 types of edible plants. The aspiration was to create a playful and delicious installation. We have designed the space as a place to meet up and be together without any limit of age, culture, gender, opinions. To make it happen, designers, horticulturists, engineers and Chefs worked together to give a real feast for the eyes, culinary experience and to encourage people to eat tasty and local grown food. We also worked hand in hand with French edible horticulturist Pauline Dominicy (Le jardin de Pauline) and Florian Dominicy Les Fuchsia Delhommeau .
The meandering and random drawing of the table is infact the result of a mathematical routine inspired by the connoli surface boundaries, generated with many constraints such as: maximum curvature of the plywood sheets, maximising planting area, giving wheelchair access to everywhere on site. The table has been made of a simple plywood and timber skeleton, that has been locally CNC cut. A skin of singly curved plywood has been screwed on the outside of this skeleton to give the final smooth finish. As is the way in many of our projects, we used the power of digital fabrication tools to allow simplification of on-site work, carried out by humans with the most simple of tools. We optimised plywood thickness, timbers members, feet location and numbers to get an optimum and appropriate quantity of material.
Photo credit: 02 Quentin Aubry, 07 & 08 Pauline Dominicy