Making Sense of Landscape

Books, Design - by Open Journal

Australia’s most awarded landscape architects celebrate at 25 years of practice with their first book, Making Sense of Landscape.

With over 1000 works completed since their inception in 1989, Taylor Cullity Lethlean (TCL) has become one of the world’s most highly regarded landscape architecture firms. Situated across offices in Adelaide and Melbourne, the firm’s reputation is revered and the value of their contribution to the Australian built environment immeasurable.

05_Canberra Arboretum_John Gollings 72dpi

Canberra Arboretum (Image: John Gollings)

Acting as a survey of their approach and a retrospective of their completed works, TCL have released Making Sense of Landscape. As well as capturing the firm’s 25-year legacy through striking architectural photography, drawings and project plans, the book invites and offers critical reflection and analysis from prominent voices in the landscape architecture field and beyond.

Published by Spacemaker Press, the book features 17 essays by writers, academics, curators, artists and designers. Each author finds an element for exploration in TCL’s work, creating a general discourse and debate on the profession as a whole, while sharing with the reader insights into the firms creative process.

Auckland Waterfront (Image: Simon Devitt)

Featured projects include

The Australian Garden at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Cranbourne – winner of the 2013 World Architecture Festival Landscape of the Year Award;
Forest Gallery, Museum of Victoria
The National Arboretum, Canberra
North Wharf Promenade, Auckland
North Terrace, Adelaide

North Terrace, Adelaide (Image: John Gollings)

The following is the opening to ‘Sensing Landscape’, the introductory essay by Gini Lee and SueAnne Ware.

To enter the Taylor Cullity Lethlean workspace, whether in Adelaide or Melbourne, is to be drawn into an exchange between the collaborative space of the design studio and the wider Australian landscapes of cities, suburbs, the outback and the infrastructures that define them.

The practice’s contribution to the making of the designed landscape is both learned and generous. For those invited into the TCL domain, their source material is made evident with equal subtlety and serious intent. Among the detritus of the busy office, collections of materials drawn from nature are arranged with care and precision. The walls are replete with imagery of landscapes captured through drawing, photography and art juxtaposed alongside the various everyday references necessary to project making.

Design studios are like this. However, TCL’s space has a particular sensibility; it feels like a welcome into the landscape project, and into the very being of the Australian landscape. The TCL family is composed through the capacity to share knowledge drawn from immersion across multiple landscapes, with special attention given to the remote spatial and material palette of the Australian outback. For the visitor, upon entering the TCL studio, the project for making sense of landscape commences…