Overgrown: Practice between Landscape Architecture and Gardening

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Landscape architecture has a fraught relationship with gardening, despite having developed from it via landscape gardening, as it has sought professionalization by becoming more architectural. Raxworthy argues that as landscape architecture has become more representational it has lost touch with maintenance tools in gardening that allow for the optimisation of the properties of change that landscape materials like plants have, such as growth. Here, Raxworthy presents an overview of his latest book, Overgrown, that advances a new model for plant form—the viridic, a landscape equivalent of the tectonic, from the Latin for green, connoting spring and growth—which he suggests has been under-theorized in landscape architecture. This talk marks the Graham-awarded publication of Overgrown: Practice between Landscape Architecture and Gardening from 2016, which was published by MIT Press in 2018.

Julian Raxworthy, PhD, is an Australian landscape architect, and teaches in the Master of Landscape Architecture and Master of Urban Design programs at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He was a recipient of a Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Fine Arts grant for his book Overgrown: Practices between Landscape Architecture and Gardening, published by The MIT Press in Fall 2018.

Image: Species from the family Araceae collected by Roberto Burle Marx highlighted around the lake at the Sitio Roberto Burle Marx, Brazil. Courtesy the author.