Avant Gardeners [Hardcover]

Tim Richardson (Author), Martha Schwartz (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 26, 2008

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 by:
• 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

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Tim Richardson is an internationally respected landscape critic. Former landscape editor at Wallpaper, gardens editor at Country Life, and founding editor of New Eden magazine, he is the author of The Vanguard Landscapes and Gardens of Martha Schwartz.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Thames & Hudson (May 26, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0500513937
• ISBN-13: 978-0500513934
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 8.7 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,344,626 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Real gardens with no plants in them?, August 2, 2009

By 

James R. Golden "(View from Federal Twist)" (Stockton, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Avant Gardeners (Hardcover)

This isn't a book for the cottage gardener or the complacent. It is certain to spark a powerful response in many readers - if it has many readers. Conceptual landscape design is not a subject of widespread interest in most gardening circles, certainly not in North America.

Avant Gardeners may delight you, annoy you, frustrate you, spark new insights about gardening and design. I have to confess my prejudice. I appreciate the work of some conceptual landscape designers. I've always liked Martha Schwartz' playful park at Jacob Javits Plaza (we call it "the Federal Building") in New York City - liked it years before I even knew it was designed by Martha Schwartz - even before I knew Martha Schwartz existed. But I dislike many of the conceptual landscapes in this book.

Admittedly, some are beautiful, or so appropriate to place, I can't deny their relevance to the urban world: I'm remembering the first landscape in the book, designed by Atelier Big City, a small, mainly concrete park for hanging out and skateboarding under an elevated bridge approach in Montreal that seems a perfect solution for an almost-waste-space. While most conceptual landscapes are urban, some are not. Wigandia, for example, William Martin's ecologically appropriate garden-cum-artwork on the side of a volcano in Australia is full of plants that thrive in drought, and it stands as a direct, even polemical, criticism of the prevalence of "British style" gardens so inappropriate to Australia, a land of sun, heat and scarce water resources.

Tim Richardson defines a conceptual garden as a landscape designed using a single overriding concept: "Conceptualist landscapes are predicated on ideas rather than plants or the architectural use of hard materials. Such spaces are underpinned by a single concept, or visual motif, which informs every aspect of the design." Many conceptual gardeners use no plants, some only artificial materials. Others design what appear to be more conventional gardens, with plants and hardscaping, but the design is controlled with strict intellectual discipline.

Mr. Richardson is a very good writer, and an agile and informed thinker about gardens. I come away from Avant Gardeners feeling disturbed, not quite able to see why many of the conceptual landscapes in this book are not more aptly called outdoor conceptual or installation art. Some choices seem to be arbitrary. Perhaps it doesn't matter and Mr. Richardson's point is just to stir things up.

I can't read his intent but, for me, this is the point of the book: to question the very meaning of the word "garden", to push the borders of our understanding of gardens, and to open up new possibilities. Whatever your reaction to this book, it will make you think about what a garden is. And that's a service to the culture of gardening throughout the world.

4.0 out of 5 stars Good for pictures and ideas., February 11, 2011

By 

Individual (Philadelphia, PA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Avant Gardeners (Hardcover)

I probably wouldn't have purchased this if I had browsed through it in the store but I compulsively shop on Amazon. It was okay, I'll flick through it periodically for ideas and inspiration - I think it's useful for anyone who is involved with designing public space (I wish there was some info on how some of the projects came about, and an inside look into production). I'm keeping it.