Name of practice: Harris Hobbs Landscapes
Introduction
Location - Various
Kanguroots, Ireland, 2007;
Harris Hobbs garden, Deakin ACT 1991 – 2010
Woden Flood Memorial, Woden Valley ACT 2009
Community Parks Package, A, (4 sites) Kambah (2), Rivett and Weston, ACT, 2008-2010
Dunlop Garden, Red Hill, Canberra, ACT, 2008
Weston Park Off-Leash Dog Park, Yarralumla, ACT 2010
Overview
The practice has sought to collaborate with artists in the realisation of projects for many years. The featured projects identify that the key to successful collaborative practice is a commitment by the client to allow the process to develop with few restrictions. This award entry demonstrates a range of small collaborative projects between Harris Hobbs and a number of artists, locally in Canberra, and internationally that have extended the practice of landscape art.
Special Factors
Positive outcomes that have flown from the collaborations include a deepened understanding of the design benefits that come from well integrated and client supported projects.
Addressing the Australian Landscape Principles
The interventions has valued the spatial qualities of the various sites – particularly with regard to the Community park Sites, valuing the natural landscape as well as former educational uses, expressed through artwork insertions, reuse of redundant play equipment as new sculptural play forms.
Protect Enhance Regenerate
The projects demonstrate innovative design through the reuse of redundant steel play equipment – reinvigorated as a range of amorphous play elements, interspersed with off the shelf items. The artist/landscape architect partnerships demonstrated in The Woden Flood Memorial, Kanguroots, the Harris Hobbs garden and the Community Parks project demonstrate cross sector partnerships with clients, artists and landscape architects.
Embrace Responsive Design
The projects demonstrate innovative, adaptable and responsive design processes; through the use of recycled material to create a new context for play equipment;
- through the collaborative partnership that developed the design ideas for the artworks based on schoolyard themes, including community involvement;
- Through planting of edible plants – Rosemary and Almonds
- through the display of Australian plant material in a European Garden Design Festival
Relevance to the profession of landscape architecture, the public, and the education of future practitioners
- The classical column has relevance to the education of future practitioners as it expresses the frustrations inherent in walking the line between what a designer can achieve and what regulations and clients permit designers to achieve.
- Kanguroots presented Australian plants to an international audience
- Dunlop Garden demonstrates water management and water reduction strategies in a heritage precinct in inner Canberra.
- The suite of projects and installed works are thought-provoking.
- The works demonstrates the fusion of practice and theory and is a collaboration between Geoff Farquhar Still, Thom Gascoigne, Ian Marr and Harris Hobbs
2010
