Abstract Pimlott
The garden is a constructed space, both real and imaginary, that organizes and controls nature while offering a place for contemplation and retreat. It is a cultural and ideological expression, materializing worldviews, social structures, and aesthetic ideals. The garden is also an intermediate space between inside and outside, a place that defines boundaries while creating a sense of openness. It can be domestic, public, or even symbolic, serving to project values of power, knowledge, or harmony with nature. Historically, it has been conceived as a microcosm of the world or an earthly paradise, revealing a human desire to master and organize the landscape. It is also a kind of stage, where elements are intentionally arranged to produce specific stories and sensations. Pimlott emphasizes that the garden is a space of transition and transformation — a place for wandering and sensory experience that, although carefully designed, evokes spontaneity and the unexpected, shifting between order and disorder, nature and artifice.
Manifesto Garden
Our project integrates the notion of the Garden as developed by Marc Pimlott. In contemporary contexts, the Garden has become an aestheticized object, used to signal openness and harmony while reinforcing systems of privilege and control. As a counter-form, our intervention introduces programmatic contamination: free, accessible, student-centered infrastructures infiltrating the rigid academic interior of EPFL. Our intervention plays with spatial ambiguity: introducing outdoor sensations, air, water, raw materiality, into the rigid, climate-controlled interior of EPFL. Drawing from the logic of a patio with balconies overlooking it, we propose a new kind of interior: collective, porous, multisensory. At its center, a fountain-kitchen, rising like a tower, filtering water, feeding plants, inviting use. Around it, a place to cook, to sit, to breathe, to care. Gratuity remains its core logic. This is a space to be inhabited, altered, reimagined. While evoking the Garden’s symbolic ideality, the project rejects passivity. It reclaims space as a shared condition, political, material, and continuously shaped by those who occupy it.