Wk 11 Piet Oudolf

 Piet Oudolf is the ‘King of Perennials’ enjoying their structure and their nature of returning, growing, and spreading year on year, in much the same way as Gertrude Jekyll admired them. His modern take is their arrangements as screaming blankets of perennials, the colours of which become silent structure in the winter months as the garden pales and silvers. This planting style is very evident at the Hauser and Wirth Garden, Somerset.

 

Oudolf’s touch is usually demonstrated by seas of swath planting, such as along the High Line in New York or Lurie Garden in Chicago. This swath planting seems to punctuate itself perfectly into the city. Personally, I’ve always found my experience at the Hauser and Wirth Garden tame, usually a dull saunter around a blobby countryside garden (sorry Oudolf). In Lurie however, the structure of the plants contends with the geometric skyscraper back drop. This image of Lurie demonstrates the effectiveness, glistening gold and silvers of low winter light on glass facades dancing back off of the winter-time plant structures and frost dusted materiality. Crucially, it introduces a beautiful soft wildness into the hard dominating order of the city.



 

https://oudolf.com/garden/lurie

https://oudolf.com

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Wk9 Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe

Image
Sir Jeffery Jellicoe experienced Classicism, Modernism and Postmodernism eras as a Landscape Architect, realising before many architectures of the time the deep theoritical processes behind designing and creating extraordinary places for people. Integating the visible and invisible world became a key methodology.  Jellicoe was able to fuse his knowledge of these artistic eras with the Kennedy Memorial project at Runnymede, UK. Here, he rejects ‘form follows function’ principles, and instead creates a ‘post-modernism’ experience which fuses japanese zen gardenmaking, Christian Pilgrim’s Progress waymaking with classical landscape elements. This pathway leads to a more modernist experience, with the Kennedy Memorial Stone sculpted as a slightly distorted ‘floating’ funerary slab, speaking Kennedy’s name. Of greatest note are granite setts which form the pathway. This uneven, already seemingly ancient pathway shows Jellicoe’s deep understanding of invisble forces such as time. This pa...
Read more

Wk 3 - North Place Concept 1 (Sketchbook)

Image
  Inspired by site survey work and contexts of Cheltenham, the bodyshape of a lying down horse sits itself very well into the space along the main desire and wayfinding lines, and sun path. The horse's bodyshape hides and empathises the buildings I wish conceal and reveal. There is more to this concept, which I will explore, develop and reveal in other drawings. 
Read more

Wk 10 Yves Brunier (Practise Professional)

Image
  Yves Brunier   Yves Brunier died young at 28 years old, but was revered by his peers, and had the passionate mentor, Rem Koolhaas, who persuaded him towards landscape architecture 4 years before his death in 1991. His condition of AIDS led Koolhaas to believe his exploitation of clashes between culture and nature through collage were an aggressive outlet of this struggle with the disease. Yves understood a tensions between city and country, and would impatiently produce collage and drawings to contented with, I perhaps imagine, a highly intelligent struggle in his mind and need to physicalise the pieces.   Shown here is Brunier’s Model for the Garden Rooms of Museum Park, Rotterdam. Collage conveys mood, here Brunier demonstrates the different feels of the rooms within the garden. The magic is that you don’t really need to know what is there completely. The collage conveys enough about scale, sense of place, entrances, routes, colours and tone, the figure in the foregro...
Read more