Kinya Maruyama, architect, artist, landscaper, member of Team Zoo, Japan & students of the School of Architecture of Nantes, France

This garden, produced in one week by twenty students of the School of Architecture (Ecole d’Architecture ) of Nantes, is the result of a novel workshop. There are traditional building techniques: wooden braiding, pisé. Contemporary materials such as grids, ganives, and gabions are used in these techniques. The result is a garden one can inhabit: one can shelter in a cave turned towards the Loire; You can cook your meal on a barbecue. Throughout the summer, the climbing vegetation will invade this construction which should gradually disappear in the eyes of the spectators who approach the plot. Kinya Maruyama is one of the founding members of Team Zoo, a cooperative of variable-geometry architectural agencies formed in the studio of Takamasa Yoshizaka, a pioneering architect of modernism in Japan. Team Zoo currently groups eleven workshops, financially independent, recognizable by their method of apprehending projects, a collective work structure and an ecological concern in the use of materials and construction techniques. Working together on projects, these teams stand out by their attention to the context, the environment, everyday practices and tradition.

The architecture of Team Zoo is renewed with every project and has no taste for mass productions. The materials used - wood, earth, bamboo, organic glue - require little energy for their production. Kinya Maruyama teaches at Waseda University of Art and Architecture in Tokyo. He often supervises students for workshops such as the 1995 festival here, or in 2006 in the International Workshop of the National School of Architecture of Grenoble, the Grands Ateliers of the Isle d'Abeau or 2007 with the children of schools as part of the Estuary of Nantes-Saint-Nazaire.