CAN A GARDEN BE ART DECO?

Art Deco gardens have generally received much less attention than Art Deco architecture. Although the gardens section of the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris in 1925 featured some spectacular designs, this form of artistic expression, both in terms of its history and its spread, has had a very different fate than architectural Art Deco.

In the course of this evening, the landscape architecture historian Ursula Wieser Benedetti will explore Art Deco (or not so Deco!) gardens in the Brussels-Capital region: how they appeared and… disappeared, as well as their intimate relationship with one of the most original movements in twentieth-century Belgian garden architecture: Le Nouveau Jardin Pittoresque. A journey that takes in gardens, their forms, their colours, their textures, their hybridisations, and digs deep into the concepts of artifice and wildness, this is an opportunity to envisage "history-based solutions" as a new source of inspiration and of reflection on contemporary and future challenges we face.