Banks of Berry Channel | Cher France | TN PLUS

Banks of Berry Channel | Cher France | TN PLUS
This project was an opportunity to bring together the laying out of a long linear landscape that crosses different, well defined, territories, and a more universal reflection on the reading of the landscape through a strong and structuring element like the Berry Canal. It is a reading of the landscape that allows one to take the step back that is indispensable for this type of project, and facilitates a fine approach to places and their dynamics, in order to make them explicit and therefore identifiable by the public.


Banks of Berry Channel | Cher France | TN PLUS
This new life-giving artery will permit direct liaisons between the different villages by freeing up the traffic routes. In this way local journeys will be able to develop via soft transport with a real comfort of use and security. This 192 km linear « public space » is a space for living where multiple practices are to be put to work. The interventions proposed address transport and commercial activity but also images and culture.

Banks of Berry Channel | Cher France | TN PLUS
The landscape of the Berry Canal inspire the imagination and reveal the diversity of scales, of view points. The also ask questions about the relationship of Man and nature. Here, the landscape is really composed, everything is there, but there are no strong relationships between the different identified zones : the objective is to establish or re-establish these relationships, these exchanges, this fluidity. This project must be developed on a strong geography that can only be understood and be understood and be lived in a universal landscape framework.

We are constantly arguing about the totality of the linear landscape and each section echoes the others. The topographical limits are the mark of the perpetuity of nature and of its inscription in the territory. The stratified structure of the vegetation os revealed and amplified. It is important to note that at no point is the landscape strictly linear : the canal does not induce a landscape that is parallel to it.

Banks of Berry Channel | Cher France | TN PLUS
The landscapes of the canal are in evolution, in transformation, propitious to a teaching of evolution. This project will take its time to find its « definitive » form : it is an opportunity. The progressive construction of its vegetation, of its paths, become the props for an educational ecology.

Water, its movements, its transformations, its properties, its impact on the flora and fauna, are the parameters developed in the work. The different speed of water following the sections are the basis for the discovery of places. Observatories and belveders allow one to rise up from the ground, to take a step back, in order to observe the beauty of places near and far, and to be able to appropriate certain places without visual perspectives towards the larger landscape.

Banks of Berry Channel | Cher France | TN PLUS
It is not about multiplying the points of attraction but about successfully installing « highlighters » (signs or signals) around them that encourage one to visit, affirming its federating mission and prolonging the walks, when one leave the places and memories remain. We want to define the basis of a project where evolution forms an integral part of the general concept : putting in place a structuring project that may be modified and completed. A project that welcomes necessary changes of programme without losing its initial sense. This notion of potential for evolution is essential in order for the project to be linked to its territory and to weave a network of places and events, propitious to the discovery or rediscovery of a piece of history that continues.

Banks of Berry Channel | Cher France | TN PLUS

IMAGE CREDIT | TN PLUS

About Damian Holmes 3245 Articles
Damian Holmes is the Founder and Editor of World Landscape Architecture (WLA). He is a registered landscape architect (AILA) working in international design practice in Australia. Damian founded WLA in 2007 to provide a website for landscape architects written by landscape architects. Connect on Linkedin at https://www.linkedin.com/in/damianholmes/