Room 4.1.3: Innovations in Landscape Architecture (Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture) - Tapa dura

"The provocative use of symbolism is an essential part of landscape art today, and Weller and Sitta are at its forefront. Typically mixing the artificial and the natural, their work explores possibilities of the new urban park and its radical hybrid nature."-Charles Jencks, architect, critic, and author of The Language of Post-Modern Architecture "The work of Room 4.1.3 enriches the theoretical discourse of contemporary landscape architecture. . . . This book is a statement of their formative ideas."-Kenneth Helphand, FASLA, University of Oregon, former editor of Landscape Journal

Room 4.1.3, an Australian landscape architecture firm, is renowned for producing some of the world's most finely tuned design work, striking a balance between theory and praxis, design and planning. The firm's projects engage visitors in a way that few public spaces have before. Founded in the 1990s by Richard Weller and Vladimir Sitta, Room 4.1.3 has received awards in more than forty open design competitions and is currently at work on a new city in Singapore, "fusion-polis." Adopting a new proscriptive approach, the designs exhibit a strong theoretical base that extends into cultural studies, art, geography, anthropology, and psychology. For example, the controversial Garden of Australian Dreams at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra is a veritable playground of meanings, invoking events of such varying cultural significance as the birth of Australia as a nation and the work of Jackson Pollock. This lavishly illustrated volume features many other award-winning Room 4.1.3 designs, including Namesti Miru in Prague, Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, and Gallipoli Peace Park in Turkey. Internationally renowned scholars and critics provide essays that contextualize each project and ultimately argue for the primacy and efficacy of poetic and subversive imagination in the formation of our environment. The works collected here, both built and unbuilt, will introduce Room 4.1.3's iconic style to an ever-widening audience in North America and open up an international discourse on new meanings of landscape architecture.