Transforming Uncommon Ground

For over twenty years, Vladimir Sitta has provoked and inspired landscape architects, garden designers and garden owners. At once poetic and technologically creative - and in both, fearlessly so - his design work constantly challenges established norms. The elemental forces of nature, earth, fire, water and gravity are vividly revealed through his artistry and the sensory, intellectual and imaginative responses that such artistry demands. This book showcases some of Vladimir Sitta's most distinctive gardens and provides the first comprehensive review of his work and his unique contribution to garden design. While he has an international reputation and practice, it is through his Australian garden designs that his distinctive voice is most clearly heard, and most of the gardens shown here - including the Red Garden, the Garden of Fire, the Sky Pool Garden and the astonishing Garangula - have been made in Australia. In the prologue leading critic Julian Raxworthy considers in depth the elements and allusions apparent in Sitta's garden designs - and in the fluent and flowing drawings Sitta refers to as 'doodles' or 'fragments', which have provided the starting point for many of the gardens. In this revealing and magnificently illustrated book, Vladimir Sitta emerges as perhaps the most inventive, disturbing and memorable garden designer of our times.