Garden Futures reframes the garden not as romantic retreat but as one of the most politically and ecologically charged sites of our Anthropocene moment, tracing a line from Derek Jarman's shingle garden to Piet Oudolf's prairie planting and beyond.
About This Book
What does it mean to cultivate a garden at a time of climate crisis, food insecurity, and colonial reckoning? Garden Futures takes this question seriously, moving across the history of ideas, contemporary urban farming, vertical gardens, and speculative design to show how horticultural practice has become a site of ecological and social imagination. Critical essays challenge the myths embedded in conventional garden ideals — the perfect lawn, the ubiquitous ornamental plant with its often-colonial genealogy — while photo-essays position the garden as a political space. This is not a book about gardening as hobby; it is about the garden as a model for how we might inhabit a shared world more responsibly.
Key Features
- 220 pages of documentary and archival photography, critical essays, historical photo-essays, and speculative project documentation
- Authors include Mateo Kries and Viviane Stappmanns, with contributions from Gilles Clement, Jamaica Kincaid, Daisy Ginsberg, Salmon Creek Farm, and EcoLogic Studio
- Notable case studies include gardens by Derek Jarman and Piet Oudolf, alongside experimental projects by Daisy Ginsberg and EcoLogic Studio
- Published by Vitra Design Museum GmbH
What You'll Discover
- How urban farms and vertical gardens are reshaping the relationship between architecture, urban planning, and food systems
- The colonial roots embedded in commonplace garden plants and the ideals of horticultural perfection they represent
- How figures such as Gilles Clement and Jamaica Kincaid use the garden as a space to make abstract concepts — ecology, climate change, food insecurity — tangible and sensory
- Speculative and experimental garden projects that propose new attitudes toward the Anthropocene, treating the entire planet as a garden requiring responsible cultivation
About the Author
Mateo Kries and Viviane Stappmanns are the lead authors of this publication, produced in association with the Vitra Design Museum. The Vitra Design Museum is recognised internationally for its research-driven exhibition and publishing programme at the intersection of design, architecture, and contemporary culture.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 220
- Dimensions: 29.3 x 24.8 x 2.5 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783945852538
- Publisher: Vitra Design Museum GmbH
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Landscape architects, urban designers, architects working across public and ecological contexts, cultural theorists with an interest in the politics of nature, and readers engaged with environmental humanities and Anthropocene discourse.