Atelier GAMA, winner of the 2016 Maryvonne Pinault Temporary Garden Prize

This year the second edition of the prize was won by Atelier GAMA, whose scheme for an outdoor concert space for the festival’s Promenades musicales was selected by a jury headed by Chantal Colleu-Dumond, director of the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire.

Atelier GAMA is a landscape-design firm founded by two alumni of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Nature et du Paysage (ENSNP) in Blois, Mélanie Gasté and Aurélien Albert. Dividing their time between Tours and Toulouse, Gasté and Albert were among the winners of the 2016 Album des Jeunes Architectes et Paysagistes, a national competition organized by France’s culture ministry.

Atelier GAMA’s design for a temporary garden consists in a poetic enclave in the prairie, a wooden Musical Raft to transport listeners to Arcadia.

Atelier GAMA’s Musical Raft can be discovered during the festival Dans les Jardins de William Christie, August 20–27, 2016.

A curtain of grasses comprises the backdrop ; a steel frame defines the backdrop ; the Musical Raft includes the stage and the tribune seating ; access is on either side via mown paths in the prairie ; the raft sits on an undulating carpet of grasses and perennials

The Maryvonne Pinault Temporary Garden Prize is supported by the Conseil départemental de la Vendée and organized in partnership with Pépinières Ripaud.