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Making sense

Ursula Buchan

Wednesday, 16th July 2008

If your ears go back, like a frightened horse, at the word ‘conceptualism’ when applied to modern art, you may not be very pleased to know that this is a hot topic in landscape design at the moment.

Conceptualist designers are great ones for show gardens, as witness their fondness for garden shows such as Cornerstone in California, Jardins de Mètis in Canada, Chaumont in France, and Hampton Court Flower Show (where the RHS for the past three years has encouraged the participation of half a dozen conceptualist designers, with impressive results). Of course, this is a very different matter from designing something which can carry its intellectual load over the long term, and these garden shows tend to encourage ‘one-liner’ designs. That is an ever-present danger with conceptualism, but at least these shows give designers an opportunity to stretch their imaginations, and for potential clients to see their work.

The problem can come with the real thing, when conceptualist layouts are often the target for brain-out-of-gear criticism — as was meted out, for example, to the Diana, Princess of Wales memorial fountain in Hyde Park, designed by Gustafson Porter. (Not only does the fountain say a great deal about both the appeal and the danger of the late Princess, but it is also a beautiful structure in itself and will be enhanced further when the trees around have had time to grow up to make a glade.)

What is encouraging about the conceptualists working at the moment is the heterogeneity of their vision. They are hard to pigeon-hole. Claude Cormier plumped for glossy red concrete tree trunks at the Palais de Congrès convention centre in Montreal, while Ron Lutsko has made botanically and ecologically nuanced ‘Sustainability Gardens’ in Redding, California. The English installation artist Julia Barton uses plants in her sculptures, while the German Herbert Dreiseitl is preoccupied with water in all its possibilities, a designer whom Richardson calls a ‘maker of liquid narratives’. And a number of them, like the Swedish Monika Gora, and the Americans Martha Schwartz and Topher Delaney (her of the monster shopping bag planters) have a lively sense of humour.