Sarah Cowles of Ruderal presents their design for the Betania Garden near Tbilisi, Georgia, which was awarded LILA 2023 Special Mention in the Garden category. We start the discussion with an update on Arsenal Oasis, another LILA-winning project from 2021 (See the presentation).
For the Betania Garden, the LILA 2023 jury wrote:
At first glance, this garden completely ignores or even challenges all the dogmas of garden design ‘by the book’. However, at a closer look, it offers a number of appropriate statements and manages to remain open to interpretations.
The oversized stairs seem to have no excuse, yet they embody a sculptural dimension whilst providing seating in a peculiar grove of densely planted trees and shrubs. More importantly, the stairs lead out of the garden, through a small door in a wooden fence, into the forest, where a ‘forest garden’ ambience is achieved by almost nothing – a table and a hammock.
There are several different dialogues between pastureland and forest, private and public, an object and its context, inside and outside, but above all, between a garden as a notion and its relation to the surroundings. The design seems to be based on questioning, yet it feels entirely confident at the same time.
This garden is full of deliberate contradictions, contrasts, beautiful strangeness, and the jury was inspired by the scope of questions it poses with so little.
Zaš Brezar (b. 1984, Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia/Slovenia) is founder and editor-in-chief of Landezine. Educated as a landscape architect (University of Ljubljana), he spent several years in practice, later establishing Landezine in 2009. He is focused on the production of space, specifically mapping, tracing and interpreting the course of landscape architecture and questioning its role in society and politics of public space.
Sarah Cowles is the Director of Ruderal, based in Tbilisi. Ruderal is a landscape architecture and planning studio focused on the emerging development markets in the Caucasus region.
For Cowles, every site project is a forum to negotiate and invent new relationships of culture and ecology. She leads multidisciplinary teams to realize complex landscape-focused projects in international contexts. Her expertise in landscape planning and design spans a range of scales, including master planning for cultural institutions, ecological rehabilitation of industrial, natural disaster, and mining sites, and urban and residential landscape design. Her prior experience includes practice with TLS Landscape Architecture, where she coordinated site design of the US Consulate in Guangzhou, and large-scale urban redevelopment projects in the San Francisco Bay Area, including Treasure Island and Hunters Point Shipyard. As a professor of Landscape Architecture in professional programs in the United States, she has held positions at The Ohio State University, Washington University, and most recently, The University of Southern California. She is a Fulbright Scholar and recently completed a Fulbright Specialist Grant in Tbilisi. Cowles received her Master of Landscape Architecture from Harvard University’s GSD and her BFA from the California College of the Arts.
