FIVE MINUTES WITH: Martí Franch

Leading up to the Forum we had a chat with Martí Franch to discuss Green Infrastructure, the impact of Gilles Clement on his practice, and his favourite transformed public spaces.

Martí Franch is the founder and principal of EMF landscape, and design professor at the Landscape Master in ETSAB Barcelona. Franch’s interest focuses on the infrastructural potential of landscape by exploring the instrumental niches for ‘Time-grounded Design’. EMF's research explores how the time dimension can be operationally introduced in the design process. The ultimate goal being to prefigure landscapes which have the capacity to change and adapt at several spatial and temporal scales. Franch holds an Honorary Doctor of Design from the University of Greenwich where he studied Landscape Architecture. He also holds Horticultural Engineering Degree from ESAB, Barcelona. Franch has been awarded an ASLA Honor Award and the VII Landscape Biennial Rosa Barba Prize in 2012 and the Landezine awards in 2016, 2020.

As a landscape architect with decades of experience, has the profession changed over the years of your practice, and if so, positively or not so positively?

Absolutely and positively. When starting my practice, the focus was primarily on the site identity and peculiarity, with a lot of attention to local materiality and ways of discovering and choreographing around the site - the genius loci - We are still totally engaged with it. Later came the discovery of the – genius temporum – and the design of regimes of care and neglect, letting nature be our ally, and understanding the project more like a time-line process of incorporating as many multiple narratives as we could.

Increasingly over the last decade, the notion of Green Infrastructure has emerged as nuclear to our debate. Such a vision demands a more systemic, trans-scalar, multi-factor approach monitoring the performance of projects, under a wide range of prisms such as habitability, climate adaptation, (bio)diversity, beauty and so on. Along with it, we also gain awareness of the need of social equity, and the scarceness of resources, that should be a crucial field of research in landscape project making.

Disappointingly, both 20 years ago and now too, Landscape Architecture is often practised as a decorative art. Exclusive, expensive and totally apart from the ecological and social challenges of the common interests. In my opinion this is the profession’s cancer. Because unfortunately, this is how widely the profession is practised, and how we are perceived as professionals, as a superfluous luxury, and not as skilled designers capable of designing with natural processes contributing to tackling relevant current local and global challenges, such as Green Infrastructure.

You’ve mentioned that you are influenced by Gilles Clément. Tell us more about his philosophy and how it informs or inspires your work.

Our project Girona’s Shores, and others, are based on the principles of Clément’s Garden in motion where gardening starts with observation and the recognition of the garden diversity according to its how dynamic. In Girona we have tried to upscale his experiences from a garden to the scale of a small town. This is an open process of learning and sharing with the town’s gardeners in order to make-do with the existing ecological dynamics and social demands. Truly a challenge. With much larger extensions and far less botanical knowledge than Clément, we were forced to simplify the regimes of care, and neglect (leave nature’s dynamics alone) and specify some basic spatial criteria. As the years pass, and common knowledge grows, more complex and botanical decisions are being gradually introduced.

That’s why I believe, as learned from Clément, this is basically a ‘software’ project, about observation, care and light inputs. After 10 years of – differentiated management - the landscape evolution is fascinating. In the same Girona’s shore project, and complementing Gilles Clément mode of practice, we were also truly influenced by the infrastructural ambition of Michel Desvigne’s works. I believe Desvigne is one of a few researching on basic, affordable, replicable solutions that might be upscaled at geographical scale to respond to major social and environmental challenges. He opposes doing masterplans, but does evolutionary stages, prototyping, and accepting doing only the first stage of a project allows time and future users to define the rest, his work has been a truly inspiring force to us.

How does the theme of Common Interests resonate with you and your work?

It feels like home. I fully agree that the public realm is both our common ground and the space of active tensions. Many of EMF’s project’s asymmetrically resonate with several of the six topics addressed in the Living Cities Forum: climate, ecology, diversity, activation, country and technology. Perhaps, I would like to take the chance of the debate in introducing an aspect that I believe that crosses them all: the current context of scarcity and lack of resources, both from the ecosystem (we are living on energetic and ecological loan) and of economical investment. Is the way we are project making sustainable? Can the solutions we build be systematically upscaled to a relevant scale? Is therefore design-by-practice research led to critical emergent topics? Or on the contrary are we often designing wedding dresses for a day of wonder? Therefore, I believe considering the real available resources is a key issue when defining an agenda for the Common Interests under the different prisms.

What are some of your favourite projects that have transformed urban space?

I will pick three. First ‘Girona’s Shores project’, a self-initiated constellation of projects ongoing for the last 10 years in my hometown. Based on the principals of Clément’s ‘garden in motion’ and the ‘design-by-management’ it has turn into a laboratory on how to marry the town’s outskirts with the surrounding rural/natural landscapes with frugal low tech, low cost solutions. An uncommon project in the sense of researching transformation through light recurrent actions of care and neglect, and above all of creating and sharing knowledge with the local actors and gardeners to extend the town’s public realm.

Second, the Club Med restoration project, done from 2005 to 2010 in Cap-de-Creus Natural Park, where we deconstructed a full holiday village with 430 bungalows, restaurants and facilities with re-naturalisation purposes. Fourteen years after is an example of radical hope in nature’s power to recover when left alone to work.

Third, an unbuild streetscape project in Barcelona, Rambla del Carmel, that adds up all the knowledge we have gathered around urban naturalization projects over the last ten years of working in one of the most dense and well-trodden cities in Europe. The three altogether somehow give tips on how green infrastructure could work when transecting from the more pristine remote natural contexts to the suburban peripheries and finally urban contexts. Each with its different levels of intervention, investment, technology, care or neglect, and modes of practice.

What is the most fulfilling part of your job?

There are a few moments I particularly enjoy. First, when first introduced to a site - unknown, undeciphered, full (or not) of character, with its peculiar materialities and ecosystems, with a lot to be done (or almost nothing), such an avalanche of questions.

Second, during the design process, and perhaps the most beautiful of them all, when you have the feeling ‘to be learning’ - it can be anything, but it wasn’t there before; about how the landscape processes, its design language, materiality, its care, technological solutions, etc. It is a moment of wonder that brings new arguments and power to lead the project to a certain direction… Always coming out of exchange or debate I find these collective moments of astonishment addictive...

A third powerful moment is when you see a project being done, after thousands of hours of team expectation’s, work and frustrations … and from this stage I particularly enjoy the laying out, the siting of the projects, and the earth-modelling phases… Finally, the reward when seeing a place being taking over by people in unexpected forms of appropriation, it is a gift for the soul.

In the in-between projects, there are another two rewarding moments, one when reading about somebody else’s ‘mode of practice’ that truly shakes your mindset and becomes a challenge for a future or ongoing project. It happened to me when I discovered Chemetoff’s ‘Plan-guide’ in Ile de Nantes, it blew my mind. And, the opposite, an almost guilty pleasure when discovering that a student or a colleague uses one of our projects as a reference for their research, on or real project. Rewarding because it makes clear that projects are at the same time totally site/time-specific, but also can be universal, and that sharing knowledge is the most powerful part of project making.

What are you most looking forward to for Living Cities Forum?

Learning from the dialogue with colleagues and the audience. And the chance to come back to Australia.

Martí Franch will be presenting in person at Living Cities Forum: Common Interests, supported by the Spanish Embassy.