JAMES ROSE CENTER HOSTS SUBURBIA TRANSFORMED 3.0
“One Garden at a Time: Exploring the Aesthetics of Landscape Experience in an Age of Sustainability” was the theme of this competition for landscape architects, designers, and students sponsored by the James Rose Center for Landscape Architectural Research and Design in Ridgewood, New Jersey. Winning designs by three students and six professionals flow loosely from the modernist principles of landscape architect (and renowned contrarian) James C. Rose (1913–1991), whose former house and landscape compose the center that bear his name. Rose, who wrote four books— including Gardens Make Me Laugh (1965)— is the subject of a monograph by Rose Center Director Dean Cardasis in the forthcoming LALH series Masters of Modern Landscape Design.
The ST 3.0 competition and traveling exhibition aim to “promote and celebrate residential designs that go beyond ‘green’ by explicitly using sustainable strategies, tactics and technologies to enrich the aesthetic spatial experience of people. The emphasis is on how such sustainable landscapes can be beautiful, inspiring, perhaps profound; and serve as examples for transforming the suburban residential fabric, one garden at a time,” according to the ST 3.0 entry guidelines.
An earlier competition, ST 2.0 (2010–2012), also sponsored by the Rose Center, yielded a crop of similarly sleek, intimately scaled designs composed of materials both humble and highly finished. Both competitions invited designs for built and visionary (unbuilt) residential landscapes alike.
The jurors for the current competition Andrea Cochran, FASLA; Tobiah Horton, LEED AP; David Kamp, FASLA; Keith LeBlanc, FASLA; and Darrel Morrison, FASLA. (Morrison, an LALH board member, is the subject of the LALH film Designing in the Prairie Spirit.) The exhibition will spend the summer at the Rose Center. For more information, visit www.jamesrosecenter.org or call 201-446-6017.
