Open Access Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington
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Our Common Ground: Finding Our Imagination in the Garden

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thesis
posted on 2022-08-01, 01:43 authored by Gilbert, Anna

Recent rhetoric in landscape architecture has illuminated the complex nature and broad scope of the discipline in such a way that augments instrumental, solutionist, and measurable modalities of practice over the imaginative.

As such, the significance of aesthetics and any criticality of nature (i.e. the gardener’s realm) are often ignored and/or dismissed. In fact, many landscape architects are ill-equipped to design gardens that move us, and some practitioners may even demarcate their practice by excluding the garden completely.

This practice-led research suggests that if this is so, then the designed ‘products’ of landscape architecture risk presenting as reductive, commodified, privatised, and devoid of imaginative quality or repose. The research addresses these concerns by engaging landscape architecture with the realm of the garden and acts of gardening. To this end, a purpose fit and performative methodology is developed to investigate garden-essence, whatever that is shown to mean. Embedded in this approach is a broader aspiration to foreground the conception of public life that posits garden presence as an essential component of our collective imagination. Consequently this research finds a way to approach and design landscape in kind with those often intangible aspects of gardening which afford delight, wonder, and reverence for the natural world.

History

Copyright Date

2020-01-01

Date of Award

2020-01-01

Publisher

Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington

Rights License

Author Retains Copyright

Degree Discipline

Landscape Architecture

Degree Grantor

Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington

Degree Level

Masters

Degree Name

Master of Architecture

ANZSRC Type Of Activity code

1 PURE BASIC RESEARCH

Victoria University of Wellington Item Type

Awarded Research Masters Thesis

Language

en_NZ

Victoria University of Wellington School

Wellington School of Architecture

Advisors

Hopewell, Hannah