“To Be / Être: Paradise is an Ecology” began as a response to a competition to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Québec City in 2008, which focused on reimagining the relationship between landscape, ecology, and public experience.
To Be / Être is an upside-down landscape enlivened by honeybees who are nourished by an expanse of human-made “wildflowers”.
Visitors to our garden see suspended, brightly coloured flexible tubes suggesting a wildflower meadow swaying in the river’s breezes. These “flowers” deliver sweetened water to nourish our garden’s buzzing caretakers who endlessly commute from their hives within a “trunk” to the abundant flower tubes above.
The mandate for the competition required that attention be brought to the region’s union of pre-colonial, French colonial, and modern eras.
The conceptual cornerstone for our project was established by asking provocative questions about our society’s relationship to nature. What if the Garden of Eden weren’t lost, but restructured — reconstructed, even — using the tools, materials, and contradictions of the present day? What would paradise look like in a world where ecology is increasingly artificial, and where nature and technology can no longer be separated?
Contemporary gardens have long incorporated artificial elements in their compositions. This garden aims to move beyond the practice of merely incorporating human-made artifacts into the garden for aesthetic ends by creating a garden predicated upon an inextricable link between its human-made parts and its organic parts. To Be / Être proposes that Paradise on Earth is already an ecology, where the human-made and organic realms coexist but as distinct parts.
The text we wrote to introduce our project reads:
The legend of the Iroquois sky goddess, Aataensic, who falls through the sky, and the 400th anniversary of Québec City exist in tandem — they both celebrate the origins of when nature and a new culture came “to be”. The honey bee, also introduced to the new world four hundred years ago, is nature’s most industrious society; it was a symbol of France from the Merovingians to Napoléon. The stability and industry of honey bees represent characterizes Canada’s first French immigrants to a land of “milk and honey.”
Paradise is Not Lost — It’s Engineered
The mythical Garden of Eden collapsed when Adam and Eve’s punishment was that they were made distinct from the natural order, creating a divide between the human-made and organic realms.
To Be / Être attempts to bridge this gap. But can we reclaim paradise not as a pristine wilderness, but as an active ecology — where nature and human-made technology are no longer at odds, but intricately intertwined?
The installation is composed of:
A hovering “meadow” of flexible PVC tubes, swaying in the wind, suspended overhead.
A central mast clad with polycarbonate panels printed with the image of a maple tree, housing real honeybee hives.
A network of pumps and irrigation nozzles delivers sweetened water from a concealed reservoir to the artificial “flowers” above.
A soft audio composition that blends the ambient buzz of bees with digitally orchestrated sound.
The bees’ movement, from hive to synthetic flower and back, becomes a daily ritual of ecological performance. Contemporary paradises are not untouched nature—they are managed, mediated, and designed.
While the bees move freely within the installation, an optional insect screen can ensure full enclosure. Every technical aspect was developed with a research scientist at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, ensuring the well-being of the bees and the functionality of the system.
From Québec City to Venice
To Be / Être was submitted as a concept to represent Canada in the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, the world’s foremost stage for architectural experimentation and dialogue.
In Venice, the project was adapted to the Canada Pavilion in the Giardini. The meadow was scaled to hover above the Pavilion’s courtyard, casting shifting green shadows during the day and glowing softly at night. These visual effects extended the small footprint of the Pavilion and created a striking contrast to the adjacent neoclassical German and British pavilions.
The installation was intended to be viewed from many vantage points in a casual and non-choreographed manner. Inside, the soft hum of the honeybees was transmitted via a microphone placed in the mast and a speaker in the Pavilion.
This fusion of synthetic and biological systems reinforces the garden’s central paradox: that our most “natural” ecologies are now reliant on deeply artificial infrastructure.
Alongside the relationship of human-made and organic landscapes, visitors are prompted to reflect on another essential yet overlooked Canadian landscape: water.
Inside, stools made from bundled “natural” Canadian water bottles underscore water’s rising value as a Canadian export and deepen the portrayal of our entwined human-made/organic ecology.
Reflective mylar wall coverings create the illusion of a fluid, unstable world — echoing both the shimmer of the meadow above and the movement of water itself.
