Avant Gardeners

by Tim Richardson, Martha Schwartz (Foreword)

Profiles of the fifty most exciting contemporary landscape design practices from around the world.

For the past decade, garden and landscape design have seen a burgeoning of new ideas on space and the experience of the outdoors. Recent garden plans have embraced the latest thinking in materials, science, and interactive design, and have appropriated ideas from related disciplines such as architecture and product design, redefining and blurring the borders of nature and the man-made.

With distinctive projects by each featured designer, this book gives an encyclopedic look at the most advanced thinking in garden design, offering a rich archive for practitioners and enthusiasts alike. In addition to practice profiles, there are thematic sections that explain the underlying principles of these innovators' highly individual approaches to creating outdoor space. The book's introduction explains how a rising generation has rejected the Romantic, naturalistic tradition of Western garden design, favoring instead the influences of Modernism, Postmodernism, Pop Art, and Land Art. 500+ color illustrations.

Including work
• Atelier Big City, Montreal
• Thomas Balsley, New York
• Andy Cao, Los Angeles
• Claude Cormier, Montreal
• Topher Delaney, San Francisco
• Gustafson-Porter, Seattle
• Fritz Haeg, Los Angeles
• Paula Hayes, New York
• Patricia Johanson, New York
• Ron Lutsko, San Francisco
• Meyer & Silberberg, San Francisco
• Nip Paysage, Montreal
• Plant, Toronto
• Mark Rios, Los Angeles
• Janet Rosenberg, Toronto
• Martha Schwartz, Boston
• Ken Smith, New York
• Michael van Valkenburgh, New York

Genres: Gardening

352 pages, Hardcover

First published May 26, 2008

Reviews

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book comprises short biographies of fifty international garden/landscape/water designers paired with well-photographed and illustrated introductions to their key projects, all of which are considered "conceptual gardens". These are interspersed with seven academic essays on the concepts, history, maxims etc. of conceptual garden design. I can't pretend to have read every word of this hefty book but it's beautifully illustrated and it does a good job of showing the variety of ideas and styles used in conceptual gardens which, like art installations, focus more on an overarching idea than on achieving standard garden prettiness, even to the point sometimes of not using plants at all.

[Nate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of profiles of conceptualist landscape designers with summaries of their approaches. I'm grateful for being introduced to Japan's Shunmyo Masuno and his creative adaptation of Japanese tradition and outlook to modern contexts.