Posted in BOOKS, ECOLOGY, GARDENS, MATERIALS, ONLINE ONLY, PLANTS, PRACTICE, RESEARCH, VIEWS, tagged Aesthetics, Alexandre Chemetoff, biology, book, client, color, design-construct-maintain, Evolution, form, gardeners, Graham Foundation, growth, horticulture, Infrastructure, Isaac Hametz, James Rose, Johannesburg, Julian Raxworthy, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Landscape Urbanism, maintenance, Manifesto of the Viridic, material, Michael Geffel, MIT Press, niche, Overgrown: Practices Between Landscape Architecture and Gardening, plantings, plants, process discourse, remediation, scientism, seasonality, shape, South Africa, taxonomy, texture, Theory, University of Oregon, Zach Mortice on December 18, 2018|
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BY ZACH MORTICE
The lago at Roberto Burle Marx’s Sítio, which he composed by eye from truckloads of species collected during his botanical expeditions. Image courtesy Julian Raxworthy.
It’s time for landscape architects to re-embrace what makes them fundamentally different.
Since its inception, it’s been hard to find much agreement in landscape architecture over the profession’s purpose and how it should work. For some contemporary designers, landscape architecture, in theory if a bit less in practice, is most visible when ecological systems are designed and deployed to remediate the earth, water, air, and biomes, often at an infrastructural scale. And yet, a profession wholly obsessed with infrastructure would seem to miss the trees for the forest.
The Australian landscape architect Julian Raxworthy posits a way forward in his new book, Overgrown: Practices Between Landscape Architecture and Gardening, published by The MIT Press. Landscape architects, he notes, have retreated from the defining element of their corner of the spatial world: the development and management of planting design. Plants, he argues, are defined by their growth over time and the maintenance used to train them. Gardeners (whose ranks Raxworthy once populated) haven’t lost track of this fact. Growth is landscape architecture’s fundamental currency. From there, he launches into a populist call to tear down the blue collar/white collar divide between gardeners and landscape architects. Raxworthy (who is headed to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, after living in Cape Town, South Africa, for five years, teaching at the University of Cape Town) seems to admire messiness and rebellion against the bespoke and delicate. That preference is not surprising if you chat him up about his days as a music writer in the 1980s in Sydney, attending shows by Public Enemy and Dead Kennedys. Of one of his case study projects (created by a designer who never studied landscape architecture), he writes: “As a gardener rather than a landscape architect, the only plans Korte produced for the project were to satisfy the authorities. All other decisions arose organically through spending four years on site with a gang of four young German laborers who had returned from Brazil and smoked marijuana constantly. He looked back on this way of working with some nostalgia, saying that this time on site was the height of his career.” (more…)
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