Ausstellung: Garden Futures: Designing with Nature

Foto © Vitra Design Museum

Copyright: Foto © Vitra Design Museum

Garden Futures is an exhibition about the history and future of the modern garden. The garden is back in the spotlight, not only as an idyllic retreat, but also as a testing ground for new ideas and experiments in biodiversity, social justice and a sustainable future. Garden Futures was previously on show at the Vitra Design Museum.

More information: nieuweinstituut.nl/en

Personal gardens
Garden Futures features gardens by designers and artists including Roberto Burle Marx, Jamaica Kincaid, Mien Ruys, Piet Oudolf and Derek Jarman. Landscape designer Burle Marx’s garden grew into an experimental landscape laboratory where he played with volume, colour, texture and perspective. For Antiguan writer Jamaica Kincaid, her garden in Vermont, USA, has been a place of connection with her own history and memories for 30 years. Filmmaker Derek Jarman cherished his garden on the inhospitable Kentish coast in the face of his own mortality at the height of the AIDS crisis.

Political gardens
But gardens are not always an expression of our personal preferences or motivations – they have also been shaped by political or commercial interests. Take the colonial trade that introduced us to tropical plants in the 19th century, or the vegetable garden as a form of self-sufficiency and food security in times of war and scarcity. The exhibition also shows how our tastes have adapted to the beautiful promises made by manufacturers of garden tools, fertilisers and patio furniture.

Sustainable gardens
Today, the garden is increasingly seen as part of an ecological system rather than a demarcated piece of land. This has led to much experimentation with alternative, sustainable garden concepts. The exhibition includes examples of conservatories, vertical forests, community gardens, floating gardens, school gardens, rooftop greenhouses, food forests, urban farms and forest gardens.

Vitra Design Museum
Garden Futures was developed in collaboration with Vitra Design Museum and the Wüstenrot Foundation. The exhibition was previously shown at Vitra in Weil am Rhein, Germany. The Dutch edition is complemented by works from the archive of garden and landscape designer Michael van Gessel and by Rotterdam examples of local ecologies.

Dutch Edition
The Dutch edition of the exhibition includes works by garden and landscape designers Michael van Gessel and Henk Gerritsen, as well as Rotterdam gardens and landscapes such as the garden village of Vreewijk, and current nature-inclusive design initiatives such as Brienenoord Island, Wijktuin Ommoord, Hofbogen and The New Garden.

The exhibition also features the presentation Memory of the Designed Landscape. Through four case studies from the programme of the same name, we explore the diversity of garden and landscape architecture archives, each with its own challenges and opportunities in terms of management and preservation.