From counter culture to eco-cathedral. The continuing legacy of Louis Guillaume le Roy

Abstract

Louis le Roy (b.1924), an artist and former arts teacher at a secondary school in Heerenveen, has been one of the main Dutch cultural philosophers of the post war era. His theories, which criticised contemporary environmental behaviour, proposed a utopian two-tiered society in which dynamic small-scale cultural systems would interconnect towns and counter large-scale monoculture. In practice however the one aspect which has provided more publicity than any other and which has made him well-known, is the creation of one tiny aspect of this; the example of the physical materialisation of these cultural systems as represented in so-called Le Roy gardens. Through these Le Roy became known as a ‘wild gardener’ or the ‘Billy Graham of weeds’ and he became ‘more popular than any professional landscape architect.’1 However few of the community-based projects he initiated in the 1960s and 70s are still active today. A short-sighted analysis of these projects might conclude that there were considerable flaws in his concepts. However Le Roy's work has had a profound impact on a more general level, which is being investigated in this paper. It explores his continuing legacy and its relevance with respect to early 21st Century issues such as sustainability, community involvement and art, which he integrated in a meaningful manner in the design process, rather than considering them as separate and distinctive add-ons.