We imagined the park of the prestigious East Hanover campus as a succession of small wooded islets. The city of Stockholm and its archipelago served as a point of reference in our reflection. The main constraint of this project lay in its long period of construction.

Choosing the archipelago as the project’s image of development allowed this necessary long period of gestation to be taken into account. Nodes of intensity are created progressively, guiding the transformation of the site over time. This system of an archipelago arranges and presents the landscape in a theatrical or pictorial fashion. The situations are multiplied, and walking through, one continually discovers new spaces, new horizons, new directions.

Our position here thus differs from the classic project approach. We conceive of the project as an accumulation of a plurality of very precise, very localized actions. Each of these actions is destined to produce new functions and usages immediately, and to facilitate those already established. These stages of the project are not acts of prefiguration, and it is not a question of an operational phasing in. These pilot projects adhere to an overall landscape logic in order to contribute at each stage, and in the end all together, to the creation of a large-scale landscape: an archipelago of forests, groves, and gardens.