Overgrown by Julian Raxworthy calls on landscape architects to embrace gardening and connecting with the site and working plants in the landscape. He encourages landscape architects to develop a new type of design practice by leaving their offices, including the visualisations and plans, to acknowledge and learn from the growing landscape.
Throughout reading the book, you often feel like you are wandering down a meandering garden path with Raxworthy using case studies and insights into the works of landscape architects, including Burle Marx, Kiley, Sven-Ingvar Andersson, McHarg, and Dutton, as he explores this notion of this new type of practice which he calls “the viridic”.
Raxworthy seeks to encourage landscape architects to work in the landscape and use the unique language of landscape architecture that makes it distinct from other design professions. The final chapter – A Manifesto for the Viridic calls on landscape architects to change practice by embracing gardening to learn about plant growth and maintained spaces to “exercise design judgement over what is emerging over time”.
Overgrown provides landscape architects with a work that challenges the existing paradigm of a design practice seeking to push landscape architects to move out of the office into the landscape as many of us yearned for during university and throughout our professional careers.
Overgrown is available from Amazon for $35.56 (as 12 July 2019)
Overgrown: Practices Between Landscape Architecture and Gardening
by Julian Raxworthy (Author), Fiona Harrisson (Foreword)
Publisher: The MIT Press; 1 edition (15 October 2018)
ISBN-10: 0262038536
ISBN-13: 978-0262038539
Overgrown was purchased by WLA from Amazon for this review. Links above are affiliated with Amazon.
Book Review by Damian Holmes is the Founder and Editor of WLA.
He is also a registered Landscape Architect with extensive experience in Australia, Canada, and China.
