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Asphalt Garden
W.A.N.T.E.D. 2003
Métis, Québec, Canada
Photos by Jean Claude Humi

The design highlights our appreciation for the ordinary asphalt landscape of roads, parking lots, and driveways.  We reinterpreted the landscape of the road, and the garden is our contemporary version of the most luxurious and precious of all garden elements: the reflecting pool.  The asphalt garden is in essence an animated oversized street puddle set against the pristine nature of the Québecois forest.  The bone structure of the pool comes from our ordinary asphalt landscape but the elements are slightly warped giving the impression of a road gone mad.  However, all elements are tightly knitted to the nature that surrounds the pool: pine, poplar and cherry trees; tall, small and dead trees; and finally, the tidal and grand St. Laurence river.