Overgrown: practices between landscape architecture and gardening
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A call for landscape architects to leave the office and return to the garden.
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Full details for this title
| Interest Age |
18+ years |
| Reading Age |
18+ years |
| Library of Congress |
Landscape architecture, Landscape gardening |
| NBS Text |
Architecture |
| ONIX Text |
General/trade |
|
| Dewey Code |
712 |
| Catalogue Code |
937936 |
Description of this Book
A call for landscape architects to leave the office and go into the garden. Addressing one of the most repressed subjects in landscape architecture, this book could only have been written by someone who is both an experienced gardener and a landscape architect. With Overgrown, Julian Raxworthy offers a watershed work in the tradition of Ian McHarg, Anne Spirn, Kevin Lynch, and Gyorgy Kepes. As a discipline, landscape architecture has distanced itself from gardening, and landscape architects take pains to distinguish themselves from gardeners or landscapers. Landscape architects tend to imagine gardens from the office, representing plants with drawings or other simulations, whereas gardeners work in the dirt, in real time, planting and pruning. In Overgrown, Julian Raxworthy calls for the integration of landscape architecture and gardening. Each has something to offer the other: Landscape architecture can design beautiful spaces, and gardening can enhance and deepen the beauty of garden environments over time. Growth, says Raxworthy, is the medium of garden development; landscape architects should leave the office and go into the garden in order to know growth in an organic, nonsimulated way. Raxworthy proposes a new practice for working with plant material that he terms the viridic (after the tectonic in architecture), from the Latin word for green, with its associations of spring and growth. He builds his argument for the viridic through six generously illustrated case studies of gardens that range from formal to informal approaches -- from a sixteenth-century French Renaissance water garden to a Scottish poet-scientist's marginal garden, barely differentiated from nature. Raxworthy argues that landscape architectural practice itself needs to be gardened, brought back into the field. He offers a Manifesto for the Viridic that casts designers and plants as vegetal partners in a renewed practice of landscape gardening.
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Author's Bio
Julian Raxworthy is a landscape architect from Australia. He convenes the Landscape Architecture and Urban Design programs in the School of Architecture, Planning, and Geomatics at the University of Cape Town.
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