ABSTRACT
Arcadia is the promise of a peaceful coexistence of man and nature, first and foremost, an ideological lie: any peace can only be a truce of which man is the temporary winner. Indeed, Arcadia is the most unnatural of all possible conditions, a mere narrative device invented to serve in turn as critique or apology of reality. The Jade Eco Park is the product of the collaboration between paysagiste Catherine Mosbach, an expert of landscape design, and Philippe Rahm, an architect whose work revolves around the idea of making space through the creation of different body conditions. The theme of landscape and of the interaction between natural and man-made environment had been at the centre of Rahm's interest long before this project, ever since his collaboration with Jean-Gilles Decosterd in the late 1990s. The competition material for Tree City is far more reassuring than that of Rahm and Mosbach's Jade Eco Park.
