The Big Asian Book of Landscape Architecture

Heike Rahmann from RMIT University, The Big Asian Book of Landscape Architecture offers fresh perspectives in the field of landscape architecture, hitherto dominated by North American and European influences, by addressing the question of ‘what it means to design, do business, and think about nature, space, and urbanism with an Asian sensibility’ (p. 12). In taking on this challenging task, Walliss and Rahmann set out to document an emerging contemporary landscape practice in Asia characterized by diversity and audacity. Notably, this book is not a national catalogue or record of ‘Asian’ design projects that define knowledge and design approaches by geographies. Instead, the book represents Asia as a milieu of manifold and overlapping framings and ideas under the moniker ‘Asia as Method’ (p. 12). The remainder of this review highlights the multiplicity of ‘relationships’ that guided the development, structure and framing of the book, and signposts potential directions for further investigation. The introduction includes a revealing behind-the-scenes story about the development of the book itself, offering an insightful perspective of the relationship between Australia and Asia as illustrated by the relationship between this book and a previous publication and workshop presented by the editorial team. The current book, as Walliss and Rahmann point out, is inspired by and based on their 2017 collaboration on a themed edition of Landscape Architecture Australia (LAA) entitled ‘Embracing the Asian Century’, born out of a critical moment when the Australian 2016 Census revealed that for the first time since colonization, the majority of overseas-born Australians came from Asia rather than Europe and that Australia is no longer ‘a neutral Anglo country in the region’ and ‘looks more like Asia than ever before’. The themed edition investigated how Australia’s changing identity and relationship with Asia influenced its local landscape architectural profession, presenting the topic in three parts, ‘Asia in Australia’, ‘Practising in Asia’ and ‘An Asian practice’. It is fair to say that it inclined towards an Australia-centric understanding of ‘Asian’ and how the ‘Asian Century’ is influencing education, practice and discourse in and beyond Australia. The themed edition of LAA was a critical catalyst for the more ambitious edited book The Big Asian Book of Landscape Architecture published three years later. While the former examined Asia in the context of its changing relationship with an increasingly Euro-Asian Australia, the latter emphasizes a new collectiveness of ‘Asia’ and the use of ‘Big’ in the book title celebrates the complexity and diversity of ideas about Asian landscape architecture. The anecdote about the workshop that laid the foundations for the book and spurred Walliss and Rahmann to expand their network of Asian designers and academics, hints at the uniqueness of doing business in an Asian context. The duo, with no funding confirmed, expressed their desire to run a workshop in Asia in a twenty-minute chance meeting with Kongjian Yu in Melbourne in 2018. As the story is told, Kongjian generously offered to host a two-day workshop in Beijing in early 2019, prompting a star cast of practitioners and academic leaders from all over Asia to accept the invitation and attend the self-funded workshop, without any book contract existing at that time. Reflecting on this critical moment of the development of the book, Walliss and Rahmann cite an analogy used by their colleague: ‘In Asia, someone might offer an invitation to get in a boat. . . . The critical point is the invitation, and its potential to develop into something, which is unknown at the point of embarking. . . . Your trip might be over quickly, or it could end up being a life-long connection’ (p. 11). The book has finally materialized, almost two years after the workshop in Beijing. The way the contents are structured reflects the relationships between the many different countries and regions in Asia, and the diverse categorization and conceptualization of the projects under discussion. The book includes textual and visual material relating to more than eighty design projects that are contextualized and/or reflected on by essays and commentary from twenty authors including academics and practitioners from across Asia and Australia. The book cover hints at the diversity and complexity of Asia and the profession in the region, featuring translations of ‘landscape architecture’ in simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Malay and Thai. However, the editors readily admit that the projects featured in the book hail predominantly from Japan, Korea, Heike Rahmann and Jillian Walliss (eds.) The Big Asian Book of Landscape Architecture