2024 PLEČNIK MEDAL for Published Scholarship
Garden and Metaphor
Authors:
Ana Kučan
Mateja Kurir
Data:
Garden and Metaphor: Essays on the Essence of the Garden
Category: Published Scholarship
Authors: Ana Kučan and Mateja Kurir, editors
Collaborators:
Published: 2023
Investor: publishing house Birkhäuser Verlag
Web site: https://birkhauser.com/de/books/9783035626551
PLEČNIK MEDAL in the category of published scholarship
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Garden and Metaphor - Jury's report
Today, in the time of climate change, natural disasters seem to be becoming a mainstay while people's attitudes towards the environment are increasingly contradictory and dissociated. In the fast pace of everyday, we rarely acknowledge that the existing paradigms of human conduct in relation to nature have been superannuated and that the future of our existence on planet Earth is not only a technical issue. People have encroached upon nature to the extent that we can hardly talk about the existence of "primordial nature" anymore; we are approaching the limits of growth. The garden as the inseparable intertwining of nature and culture may in this regard serve as a prime metaphor for the human attitude towards nature in the Anthropocene epoch, and offer a starting point for many a soul-searching.
The collection of essays on the garden is distinguished by an emphatically interdisciplinary approach. It addresses the multitude of roles and metaphors of the garden, from an intimate shelter to an all-encompassing world. The contributions by Slovene and foreign authors active in various fields, both designers and those looking at the garden from the outside, unveil various views - including some surprising ones - on what a garden can or could be. The layering of concepts and meanings offers interesting premises for understanding the garden in the current social context. The book brings an in-depth research into the contemporary understanding of the garden and as such represents a homage to the work of Professor Dušan Ogrin, the founder of the Ljubljana landscaping-architectural school.
In the same way a garden is a junction - at once cultivated and untamed - of two worlds, the Earthly reality and the world of ideas, the book Garden and Metaphor is a well measured amalgamation of the expert and the rational with the poetic and the sensual. Steeped in optimism, it addresses the future with the Utopian idea of how to act in order to engender a world better than that in which we live. The garden, the archetype of human intervention into nature, is in this regard understood as a metaphor, as a model for considered, patient, and humble concern for the fellow human being, and for instilling order into the world.
The book Garden and Metaphor: Essays on the Essence of the Garden represents an original contribution to the development of landscaping and architectural thought in the international arena. As such, the work is awarded the Plečnik Medal for Published Scholarship.
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