Philippe Poullaouec-Gonidec

As a child, Philippe Poullaouec-Gonidec, a captain's son, spent his summers on the seas and oceans with his father. The languorous approach of coastlines and the contours of the land that slowly came into view, the sounds, the smells of the shore that came after, pervaded the imagination of this native Breton. They are central to his interest-more precisely, his passion-for landscape.
 A landscape architect and shaper of the environment, he is today a professor at the University of Montreal's School of Architecture and Landscape. He also holds the University's Chair on Landscape and Environment and the UNESCO Chair on Landscape and Environment. He has been a visiting professor at the La Villette School of Architecture in Paris, France, at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" in Italy, at the Hanoi University of Architecture in Vietnam, and at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Reggio Calabria in Italy. He is the author of numerous scientific publications and serves as an international authority for many institutions. He currently supports the development of programmes of advanced study in landscape architecture at the Lebanese University in Beirut, Lebanon, and at the National School of Architecture in Rabat, Morocco.
 As a way of underscoring the cultural dimension of landscape, Philippe Poullaouec-Gonidec likes to say that without the individual, without him looking on, there is no landscape. Both a landscape theorist and practitioner, he has devoted himself to a number of public and experimental projects, earning various awards, notably the Award of Excellence of the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects, for his campus landscape design for the University of Sherbrooke; the Award of Excellence of the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects and the Ordre des architectes du Québec, for the Place Berri project; and, in 1993, the 25th Anniversary Canadian Architect Award of Excellence for the Faubourg Québec project.