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Product Description
"The Contemporary Garden" is an illustrated survey of 100 iconic and innovative gardens in the world, spanning from the early 1920s to the present day. Accessible and easy-to-use like Phaidon's popular "The Garden Book", this informative source book includes an unrivalled range of gardens by designers, makers, architects and land artists - from Garrett Eckbo's Alcoa Forecast Garden (1925) and Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye (1929) to Ian Hamilton Finlay's Little Sparta (1966) and horticultural installation artist Tony Heywood's Split (2003). Each garden has been selected for its unique design, marking a break from traditional gardens and presenting new and sometimes conceptual designs. The selection ranges from the public to the private and all types are featured - Modernist gardens, conceptual spaces, roof and water gardens, contemporary interpretations of traditional garden styles and urban parks and landscapes.Other examples include Gabriel Guevrekian's Villa Noailles (1927) in France, Fernando Caruncho's startlingly unusual Wheat Garden (1990) in Spain, Kathryn Gustafson's Diana Memorial Fountain (2004) in England and Tadao Ando's Zen-like Garden of Fine Arts (1994) in Japan. "The Contemporary Garden" presents projects by forward-looking garden designers from around the globe. Today's most arresting garden designs are often based on traditional principles but the interpretation - with the use of innovative materials, unusual plants and unexpected forms - offers a new approach to planting and alternative solutions to garden, backyard or outdoor space design. Featuring the use of artificial materials, such as Robert Mallet-Stevens' Garden with Concrete Trees (1925) and Dean Cardasis' Plastic Garden (1995), "The Contemporary Garden" also offers an examination of the impact of unique, iconic gardens designed by the likes of Isamu Noguchi, Roberto Burle Marx and Luis Barragan, among others.In addition, the selection includes gardens by famous artistic and architectural figures such as Henry Moore, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Joan Miro and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Organised chronologically, readers can trace the development of the non-traditional garden in all its variations from the early experimentations of the twentieth century to the visionary ideas of today's practitioners. Each entry consists of a full-page image with an accompanying text, placing the garden and its maker in stylistic and historical context. The book also features a glossary of terms and movements, a directory of gardens open to the public and an index. "The Contemporary Garden" is a practical resource and an easy-to-use guide, unique in its appeal to both the general reader and the practicing gardener.
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5 reviews
23 of 24 people found the following review helpful
The Garden as Modern Art
17 May 2009
Format:Hardcover
The editors of Phaidon Press continue to impress me. They make rigorous work seem easy. In their latest publication The Contemporary Garden, they tackle an encyclopedic amount of material [as they did with The English Garden] and distill it into an easy-to-read picture essay. In this instance the essay is about the evolution of the contemporary garden from the early 1920's up until today.
As some readers have discovered, a garden does not always refer to a front or back lawn with beautiful flowers. Often, it is a substantial expanse of land surrounding either a residential dwelling or a public building. The type of landscape treatment used for these spaces usually reflects the aesthetic philosophy of the artist, architect or landscape architect responsible for designing it. That style may reflect trends in modernity. From that perspective, this book offers an historical summary of the modern movement in arts, sculpture and architecture as interpreted in landscape design.
The book covers many of the seminal contemporary gardens, including ones by sculptor Constantin Brancusi, landscape architect Shunmyo Masuno, architect Frank Gherry and garden designer Piet Oudolf. Among the one hundred gardens presented in this book, two stand out for this reviewer. The first is the waterfall grotto located beneath the Frank Lloyd Wright home "Falling Waters" in Pennsylvania, USA. Mr. Wright chose to leave nature untouched by positioning that home directly over a waterfall. The second is the outdoor installation designed by landscape architect Claude Cormier titled "Blue Stick Garden". Originally created in Canada for the Metis International Garden Festival, it moved to Hestercombe Gardens in Somerset U.K. where it gained additional fame for its audacity and vibrancy.
This is a provocative book for perennial gardeners. By our nature, we tend to be traditional in our outlook. Consequently, an ultra modern garden is not always a pleasant place for us. This book reminds us that without modernity and modern building materials, contemporary artists could not be true to their times. While the modernity of some gardens may leave us wanting, at least we now can appreciate the context in which they were created. This has been an exhilarating book to read and even more exciting to review.
Read more of my reviews at Bookpleasures.com
As some readers have discovered, a garden does not always refer to a front or back lawn with beautiful flowers. Often, it is a substantial expanse of land surrounding either a residential dwelling or a public building. The type of landscape treatment used for these spaces usually reflects the aesthetic philosophy of the artist, architect or landscape architect responsible for designing it. That style may reflect trends in modernity. From that perspective, this book offers an historical summary of the modern movement in arts, sculpture and architecture as interpreted in landscape design.
The book covers many of the seminal contemporary gardens, including ones by sculptor Constantin Brancusi, landscape architect Shunmyo Masuno, architect Frank Gherry and garden designer Piet Oudolf. Among the one hundred gardens presented in this book, two stand out for this reviewer. The first is the waterfall grotto located beneath the Frank Lloyd Wright home "Falling Waters" in Pennsylvania, USA. Mr. Wright chose to leave nature untouched by positioning that home directly over a waterfall. The second is the outdoor installation designed by landscape architect Claude Cormier titled "Blue Stick Garden". Originally created in Canada for the Metis International Garden Festival, it moved to Hestercombe Gardens in Somerset U.K. where it gained additional fame for its audacity and vibrancy.
This is a provocative book for perennial gardeners. By our nature, we tend to be traditional in our outlook. Consequently, an ultra modern garden is not always a pleasant place for us. This book reminds us that without modernity and modern building materials, contemporary artists could not be true to their times. While the modernity of some gardens may leave us wanting, at least we now can appreciate the context in which they were created. This has been an exhilarating book to read and even more exciting to review.
Read more of my reviews at Bookpleasures.com
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
1 photo wonder
6 Mar 2012
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Each garden has only 1 photo. There is no way that 1 photo can adequately describe a garden. Very disappointed in the content of this book.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Good Photo Book
26 July 2011
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
It was a pretty good book but a bit lacking in the descriptions of the gardens. I now realize it's primarily a coffee table book with pretty photographs. If I had it to do all over.... I would probably just check it out from a library.
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