Eric Guibert is a gardener architect.
He has studied in France at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Nantes, Germany and the UK where he completed his Masters at the Bartlett, UCL, London.
Eric is a senior lecturer in the School of Architecture and Cities at the University of Westminster in London and supervises MA in Landscape Architecture student’s thesis at the Bartlett.
Eric is a keen ecological gardener. Through a lifelong experience of gardening both indoors and out, he has developed an extensive knowledge of horticulture and ecology. In the last 10 years he has been developing a wild garden in France which acts as a testbed for experimentation in designing with the dynamic of a place through the performance of Landscape Gestures. It is also in this location that the prototypes of some of the Planted Buildings are being tested.
He researches through the design and realisation of projects in dialogue with an academic reflection and design based methods. He completed his PhD in 2017: The Gardener Architect: Designing with the emergent Natures of Places – (online access), which he developed as an ADAPT-r research fellow at the Faculty of Architecture in Brussels of KU Leuven, Belgium, (funded by the EU through the Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions – Research Fellowship Programme).
The research is now being developed in more politically complex, more contested, sites, as well as a new academic design studio.
Previously, Eric chaired the Small Practice Committee at the RIBA where he co-organised Guerrilla Tactics for 5 years; this is the Small Practice Conference.