Piet Oudolf, a 75-year-old Dutch landscaper, is considered one of the pioneers of a generation of garden designers who, in the late 1980s, began to question traditional landscape gardening because, in his opinion, it was too decorative and consumed many resources and manpower.
His projects began using perennials, often self-regenerating plants, shrubs, and wildflowers that had long been ignored as garden plants, and began arranging them in an unconventional way, too. Oudolf does not consider himself as the founder of a movement.
«Let others say what I am. For some, I'm just a gardener». However, in recent decades this simple gardener has designed numerous public gardens around the world transforming gardening discourse into numerous urban settings ranging from interventions for Hauser & Wirth Somerset, the Serpentine art gallery, the Venice Biennale, the «High Line» in New York or the Chillida Leku gardens in Hernani, Gipuzcoa, Spain.
His projects began using perennials, often self-regenerating plants, shrubs, and wildflowers that had long been ignored as garden plants, and began arranging them in an unconventional way, too. Oudolf does not consider himself as the founder of a movement.
«Let others say what I am. For some, I'm just a gardener». However, in recent decades this simple gardener has designed numerous public gardens around the world transforming gardening discourse into numerous urban settings ranging from interventions for Hauser & Wirth Somerset, the Serpentine art gallery, the Venice Biennale, the «High Line» in New York or the Chillida Leku gardens in Hernani, Gipuzcoa, Spain.
«During the first decades of the Vitra Campus development we did not ask ourselves the question of landscape design. The first landscape interventions came with the launch of the projects by Alvaro Siza (Siza Promenade) and Günther Vogt, when the north and south areas of the Campus were connected. Piet Oudolf's garden gives it a new dimension and offers visitors a different experience; an experience that also changes continuously.»
Rolf Fehlbaum, Vitra President Emeritus.
What Oudolf's projects have in common is the idea of a landscape that seems wild and untamed, but that in reality could not exist without meticulous planning and equally careful maintenance.
His designs play with certain social ideas about the concept of "the wild". "I'm just trying to make people's fantasies come true," he said. However, its gardens are not wild at all. Rather, he strives for a balanced composition or, as he calls it, A "community" of plants with different strengths and weaknesses and different flowering periods and life cycles, so that the garden offers a sensory experience throughout the year and maintain its beauty both in the months of splendor and in those of decline.
This requires meticulous organization, a very precise timetable and an exhaustive search for the right plants and their possible suppliers, apart from a plantation project that, in the case of Piet OudoIf, is a work of art in itself.
A new garden by Piet Oudolf, on the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein. Photograph by Dejan Jovanovic / Vitra
The same can be said of the basic outline of Oudolf's project for the Vitra Campus. Around 30,000 plants will be used, among which are examples with such enigmatic names as Persicaria amplexicaulis, Echinacea pallida or Molinia caerulea. All these plants form the framework of the garden, in which there are no construction structures but which in no way resigns itself to becoming a mere decoration for the surrounding architecture. Rather it happens that the landscape completes the buildings and opens up new perspectives for them, as Oudolf points out.
The objective of the garden is to direct visitors' attention from the buildings to the ground and create in them a suggestive state of disorientation. The viewer walks among the plants along winding paths looking - in vain - for a strict geometry with straight lines and a clear focal point. "I want people to get lost in the garden instead of going through it," says Oudolf, who wants to make sure that the people who visit his gardens feel the same way as him: an encounter as emotional as it is aesthetic.
For Piet Oudolf, who previously worked as a waiter and fishmonger, plants are more than just the organic matter he uses to beautify his gardens. His relationship with the plant world, he says, borders on obsession. His knowledge rivals that of a botanist, but he applies it rather in the manner of a theater director. "For me, plants are like actors that I can use and organize according to their appearance and behavior." Each one of them "acts" in its own way, but in the end what emerges is an interesting theatrical composition ".
If the weather and other circumstances are favorable, the first results of this floral theater should start to be seen at the Vitra Campus in September. But this is only the beginning, says Oudolf. “It is not a matter of painting a painting and hanging it on the wall. It is painting it and letting it grow and decay".
His designs play with certain social ideas about the concept of "the wild". "I'm just trying to make people's fantasies come true," he said. However, its gardens are not wild at all. Rather, he strives for a balanced composition or, as he calls it, A "community" of plants with different strengths and weaknesses and different flowering periods and life cycles, so that the garden offers a sensory experience throughout the year and maintain its beauty both in the months of splendor and in those of decline.
This requires meticulous organization, a very precise timetable and an exhaustive search for the right plants and their possible suppliers, apart from a plantation project that, in the case of Piet OudoIf, is a work of art in itself.
A new garden by Piet Oudolf, on the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein. Photograph by Dejan Jovanovic / Vitra
The same can be said of the basic outline of Oudolf's project for the Vitra Campus. Around 30,000 plants will be used, among which are examples with such enigmatic names as Persicaria amplexicaulis, Echinacea pallida or Molinia caerulea. All these plants form the framework of the garden, in which there are no construction structures but which in no way resigns itself to becoming a mere decoration for the surrounding architecture. Rather it happens that the landscape completes the buildings and opens up new perspectives for them, as Oudolf points out.
The objective of the garden is to direct visitors' attention from the buildings to the ground and create in them a suggestive state of disorientation. The viewer walks among the plants along winding paths looking - in vain - for a strict geometry with straight lines and a clear focal point. "I want people to get lost in the garden instead of going through it," says Oudolf, who wants to make sure that the people who visit his gardens feel the same way as him: an encounter as emotional as it is aesthetic.
For Piet Oudolf, who previously worked as a waiter and fishmonger, plants are more than just the organic matter he uses to beautify his gardens. His relationship with the plant world, he says, borders on obsession. His knowledge rivals that of a botanist, but he applies it rather in the manner of a theater director. "For me, plants are like actors that I can use and organize according to their appearance and behavior." Each one of them "acts" in its own way, but in the end what emerges is an interesting theatrical composition ".
If the weather and other circumstances are favorable, the first results of this floral theater should start to be seen at the Vitra Campus in September. But this is only the beginning, says Oudolf. “It is not a matter of painting a painting and hanging it on the wall. It is painting it and letting it grow and decay".
