What will be the future of natural and built landscapes as we face climate change, political turmoil, and technological advancements? What constitutes heritage and how can it be preserved? What can be adapted to emerging and unpredictable futures?
Renowned practitioners and researchers will gather at Longwood Gardens on October 15 & 16 to share projects, propose ideas, and discuss. This international symposium will also celebrate the relocation and reconstruction of its Cascade Garden, designed by Roberto Burle Marx.
Speakers include Anita Berrizbeitia, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Paul B. Redman of Longwood Gardens, Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi of Weiss/Manfredi, Kristin Frederickson of Reed Hilderbrand, and Kongjian Yu of Turenscape. Learn more and register at https://designingchange.longwoodgardens.org/
The study of landscape design is essentially a study of human culture; the way people shape their environment reflects a sense of their place in the world. Traditionally western landscape design has veered between the Classic and Romantic traditions, pitting European formality against English naturalism. During the twentieth century however, these stylistic polarities gave way to new concerns as designers looked increasingly to the historical, political and cultural context of their sites. As the New World was often in the forefront of this movement, this Gardens Trust four-lecture series on American Moderns will examine key landscapes from the two continents, exploring the designs which pushed the boundaries of the profession by pioneering new approaches, reflecting new philosophies and challenging assumptions about the form, use and meaning of landscape. You may purchase tickets for the entire series through Eventbrite for £16, or individual sessions costing £5, at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/american-moderns-tickets-670807291667Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days (and again a few hours) prior to the start of the first talk (If you do not receive this link please contact us), and a link to the recorded session will be sent shortly after each session and will be available for 1 week.
Week One on November 14 is Landscape and National Identity. Geoffrey Jellicoe once claimed that ‘All man-made environment is a projection of our psyche, whether individual or collective’. This lecture will explore how designers from different parts of the Americas – the Brazilian Roberto Burle Marx, the Mexican Luis Barragan and the American Thomas Church – used gardens and landscapes to shape and promote ideas of national identity. Wary of the European traditions of their country’s former colonial rulers, these designers looked to indigenous flora, building materials, architecture, agricultural methods, cultural traditions and mythologies to establish distinct, new approaches which reflect the national and local character of their sites. Image: Sítio Roberto Burle Marx, Rio de Janeiro. Halley Pacheco de Oliveira
Speaker Katie Campbell is a writer and garden historian. She lectures widely, has taught at Birkbeck, Bristol and Buckingham universities; she writes for various publications, and leads art and garden tours. Her most recent book, Cultivating the Renaissance(Routledge, 2021) , explores the evolution of Renaissance ideas and aesthetics through the Medici Tuscan villas. Her previous book,British Gardens in Time(Quarto, 2014), accompanied the BBC television series. Earlier works include Paradise of Exiles (Francis Lincoln, 2009), looking at the late nineteenth century Anglo-American garden-makers in Florence,Icons of Twentieth Century Landscape Design (Frances Lincoln, 2006) and Policies and Pleasaunces (Barn Elms, 2007), a Guide to Scotland’s Gardens.
Anita Berrizbeitia is a Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She served as Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture between 2015-2022 and as Program Director of the Master in Landscape Architecture Degree Programs between 2012-2015. Her research explores nineteenth and twentieth-century public realm landscapes, with interests in material culture, urban political ecology, and the productive functions of landscapes in processes of urbanization and climate adaptation. Her research on Latin American cities and landscapes focuses, in addition, on the role of large-scale infrastructural projects on territorial organization, climate adaptation, and on the interface between landscape and emerging urbanization.
A licensed landscape architect, she has worked on a broad range of projects and competitions, including urban design, campus planning, public parks, and residential gardens. She is a consultant for national and international landscape architectural firms and has served on juries of multiple design competitions in the US and abroad, including Chair of the Jury of the Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, and design competitions in Chile, Ecuador, Argentina, Spain, and the Middle East. At Harvard, she serves on the university’s Design Review Board, the Harvard University Committee on the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute Public Art Competition. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Landscape Architecture (JoLA). Before joining the GSD in 2009 she was a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania.
At the GSD she has taught core Landscape Architecture studios and core Urban Design studios. Her option studios have focused on urban and territorial scale infrastructures, on emergent urbanization, and climate adaptation. She has also taught design theory in both the core and elective curricula.
Berrizbeitia is editor of Urban Landscape—Critical Concepts in Built Environment Series; editor of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates: Reconstructing Urban Landscapes(Yale University Press), which received an ASLA Honor Award; author of Roberto Burle Marx in Caracas: Parque del Este, 1956–1961 (Penn Press), awarded the inaugural J.B. Jackson Book Prize in 2007 from the Foundation for Landscape Studies; and co-author with Linda Pollak of Inside/Outside: Between Architecture and Landscape, which won an ASLA Merit Award. Her essays have been published widely in journals and anthologies, including the Journal of Landscape Architecture (JoLA); Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes; Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts(National Gallery of Art); Cultural History of Gardens (Berg Publishers); Sao Paolo: A Graphic Biography(University of Texas Press), Cerros Islas Santiago (Fundación Cerros Islas); Recovering Landscape(Princeton Architectural Press);CASE: Downsview Park Toronto(Prestel); Large Parks(Princeton Architectural Press); and Retorno al Paisaje (Evren) among others. With Diane Davis, she co-edited Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics (2021).
Berrizbeitia received a BA from Wellesley College in Studio Art and an MLA from the GSD. She was awarded the Prince Charitable Trusts Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome in 2006.
This lecture explores how developments in the earth sciences—specifically geology, evolutionism, and biogeography—ushered in advances in design methodologies for large public–realm landscapes in late nineteenth-century Boston.
In her earlier work on Charles Eliot’s Metropolitan Park System of 1892, she argued that geology had provided a framework for re-envisioning what had become a fragmented territory as a unified whole. Eliot proposed the region’s formative processes and the thick and unseen strata underlying the visible and varied topography in and around Boston as the foundation for a new political geography for a rapidly expanding city. For the Blue Hills, the largest of the reservations of the park system, Eliot turns his attention to the surface, proposed as a mantle of vegetation that drapes over the hills’ granitic foundation. Eliot introduces methods of biogeography to fieldwork, of forestry and conservation, and of what today we call restoration ecology. However, Eliot also prompts us to reconsider the role of the wild and wilderness, and of aesthetics in relationship to a growing public. Rather than being the product of a singular or unified framework, his proposal shows us the intertwining of multiple design methods and ways of knowing that join notions of the “wild” and of the “urban.”
Harvard Graduate School of Design is proud to host this October 10 Frederick Law Olmsted free lecture at Gund Hall’s Piper Auditorium beginning at 6:30 pm. For complete details visit www.gsd.harvard.edu
Brazil is a land of astounding beauty and unsurpassed diversity. It is also the birthplace of Roberto Burle Marx, one of the most influential and groundbreaking landscape artists of the 20th century. In addition to introducing modernist landscape architecture to Brazil, he was also a noted painter, printmaker, musician, ecologist, and naturalist.
Burle Marx eschewed typical European geometrical garden design and brought to the Brazilian landscape (and to the world) the use of colorful native species in conjunction with abstract and cubist patterns. C. Colston Burrell explores Burle Marx’s home and studio, where he collected and studied the native plants found in the jungles of Brazil, as well as private gardens and parks he created for friends and municipalities.
Burrell is a lecturer, garden designer, and photographer. The author of 12 gardening books, he has twice won the American Horticultural Society Book Award.
The March 31 online program is sponsored by Smithsonian Associates, and is $25 for Smithsonian members, $30 for nonmembers. Register at www.smithsonianassociates.org
The exhibition is titled after a 141â€x59†painted tablecloth specifically designed to fit Ramoa’s dining table. Just like another tablecloth on display at SÃtio Burle Marx in Guaratiba, Rio de Janeiro, this work clearly demonstrates Burle Marx’s originality as a multifaceted artist whose work cannot be exclusively categorized as landscape architecture. Lauro Cavalcanti – curator of the retrospective exhibition “Roberto Burle Marx 100 anos: A permanência do Instável†– stated that Burle Marx “…painted every day in the morning and in the afternoon he did his gardens†and did not enjoy the fact that his paintings were relegated to a secondary position.
Also on display will be 12 india-ink works on paper, dated from 1973 to 1990, which reveal Burle Marx’s loose proficiency. While dispensing color – something inherently his due to his activity as a landscape architect – Burle Marx still follows the same provocative abstract morphology that characterized South-American art during the second half of the 20th century, providing the viewer some hints on issues like urbanism and landscaping. Along with these works some never before seen letters and photography of Burle Marx and Ramoa will be available.
“Tablecloth/Toalha†is an exhibition that wants to show Burle Marx’s activity not only as a landscape architect, but also as a prolific and inventive artist. In the end, one might question whether it is the architectural grammar that is present on Burle Marx’s paintings or the pictorial language that is present in his landscape projects.
Spend the evening with Anthony Archer Wills on Friday, August 27, beginning at 7 pm, for an illustrated lecture entitled “The Art of Water in the Garden,” sponsored by Garden Design School. The event will take place at Elm Bank, home of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in Wellesley, and will be a terrific “prequel” to The Garden Club of the Back Bay’s “Water” themed lecture series for 2010/2011.  Mr. Wills is a world-renowned water garden designer, true artisan, and pioneer.  Anthony Archer-Wills works earth and water to create environments that indulge the imagination, and delight the senses.
Inspired as a schoolchild watching water well up from the ground in the woods, and influenced by Roberto Burle Marx of Brazil, who used architectural materials, curving water shapes and mass plantings on a large scale to “paint the landscape,†Anthony began designing water gardens in the 1960s.
A true pioneer and artisan, he developed new water gardening techniques while completing his first large-scale projects for Safari Parks in England, and Bear Park in Scotland. By the mid-1970s, his techniques were adopted worldwide as the industry standard for building water gardens.
Anthony has gone on to create more than 2,000 water features in Great Britain, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Switzerland, South America, Argentina and Turkey, as well as the United States.
He is the author of The Water Gardener, Water Power and Designing Water Gardens, which have been published in five languages. Pre-registration is required. Admission is $75. For more information, or to register, call 513-867-0437, email info@gardendesignschool.com, or log on to www.gardendesignschool.com.
