Designing Gardens: 50 Years of Landscape Architecture

Gardens created with a simple, uncomplicated, harmonious design, to bring out the best in nature and focus attention on it. Designs of sections and landscaped curves that model and soften the lay of the land, generating a sense of continuity and of tranquillity. There are 22 gardens illustrated in this book: 16 of them are private gardens distributed in every one of Italy’s different climate zones, three adorn corporate facilities (Loro Piana, Kartell and De Padova), one is a winter garden, one is a banking centre and the last is in the Cloisters at the Abbey of Mirasole. Altogether, they demonstrate how a well-designed garden not only translates into a scene of stunning visual impact, but also ensures economy of maintenance and future evolution. Some of these gardens feature sweeping open spaces of lawn, ideal for mechanical mowing, while others have clumps of trees and shrubs dotted artfully here and there to create shields that protect from the wind or shield against unattractive views. Like the dense curtain of deciduous trees and evergreens designed and planted forty years ago in the Sculpture Garden: photographed now, it displays all the splendour of vegetation that has reached luxuriant maturity. In the last part of the book, a summary of works classified by categories narrates the story of fifty years of working to build gardens.