This survey of contemporary landscape architecture may come as a surprise to those who imagine that the high art of garden design, which reached its zenith in the classically former gardens of 19th-century English manor houses, is an exhausted field. Guy Cooper and Gordon Taylor, partners in a London landscape design firm, have assembled a sumptuous collection of photographs of some 30 modern designers. Many of the examples are quirky, even bizarre, such as Martha Schwartz's "bagel garden" in Boston, featuring two rows of lacquered bagels (plain, not onion). Some of them, such as Dan Kiley's elegant, modernist venues, are seductive and stylish. Others are simply beautiful. "Gardens should be freed from the boxwood of history," one landscape architect featured in the volume proclaims. The landscapes presented here certainly achieve that aim.
The New York Times Book Review, Michael Pollan
Paradise Transformed is fully as gorgeous as any work of garden porn I've ever thumbed, yet it's a whole lot more provocative.
Book Description
An international survey of contemporary landscape architecture, from the elegant modernist compositions of Dan Kiley to the postmodern gardens of Martha Schwartz.
Paradise Transformed: The Private Garden for the Twenty-First Century FROM THE PUBLISHER
The last two decades have seen a great explosion in the diversity, function, and beauty of modern landscape architecture. Private commissions have been the testing ground for the most radical experimentation. This first major survey of contemporary private gardens explores the imaginative ideas behind landscape design today. Almost fifty projects from more than twenty-five landscape architects worldwide are thoroughly documented here. Diversity characterizes each designer's work. The modernist aesthetic, translated from art and architecture - especially the strains of cubism, the International Style, postmodernism, minimalism, and Earth Art - gives form to a great number of the landscapes presented. Many designs have been equally influenced by the legacy of Luis Barragan, Isamu Noguchi, and Roberto Burle Marx. A consideration of the physical and social contexts is also evident in the designers' concern for the environment. The remarkable blend of projects in this volume captures contemporary landscape architecture at the moment when it signals what is to come in the twenty-first-century.
Art & Photography
Book Info
