Transforming Uncommon Ground
Gardens of Vladimir Sitta

For over twenty years, Vladimir Sitta has provoked and inspired landscape architects, garden designers and garden owners. At once poetic and technologically creative - and in both, fearlessly so - his design work constantly challenges established norms. The elemental forces of nature, earth, fire, water and gravity are vividly revealed through his artistry and the sensory, intellectual and imaginative responses that such artistry demands.

This book showcases some of Vladimir Sitta's most distinctive gardens and provides the first comprehensive review of his work and his unique contribution to garden design. While he has an international reputation and practice, it is through his Australian garden designs that his distinctive voice is most clearly heard, and most of the gardens shown here - including the Red Garden, the Garden of Fire, the Sky Pool Garden and the astonishing Garangula - have been made in Australia. In the prologue leading critic Julian Raxworthy considers in depth the elements and allusions apparent in Sitta's garden designs - and in the fluent and flowing drawings Sitta refers to as 'doodles' or 'fragments', which have provided the starting point for many of the gardens.

In this revealing and magnificently illustrated book, Vladimir Sitta emerges as perhaps the most inventive, disturbing and memorable garden designer of our times.

Foreword by Julian Raxworthy

Photographs of Vladimir Sitta's residential garden projects suggest his body of work

is consistent, employing the formal design strategies and common landscaping materials

of conventional landscaping. However, if we hold Sitta's drawings up against that same

work, and imagine his strong personality cynically overlooking the whole scene, then

his work is very different from the good taste it appears to embody.

Vladimir Sitta's design work is contradictory, juxtaposing opposites, or at the very least creating awkward adjacencies: pagan-Christian; public-private; subject-object; culture-nature; natural-artifi cial; specifi c-general; theoretical-practical. In reality these elements are not in opposition but in dialogue, with the emphasis on the difficult parts of the conversation. The most interesting aspects of Sitta's work also provide the strongest basis for discussion and critique.

To engage in such discussion is to look beyond what I refer to as 'Garden Porn' (carefully composed photographs of lush gardens) and examine personal aspects of Sitta's work. The most readily available means to do that, without delving too far into his biography, is through his drawings.

Well before I knew anything of Sitta's work, it was a drawing of his that alerted me to his

existence. That drawing, coupled with the fact that everything was not as it appeared in

Australian landscape architecture, sparked my interest. I had seen his odd drawing on the

last page of an edition of Landscape Australia, the professional magazine of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects. Heavily drawn in black and white was a spiral staircase leaving a building, but spiralling back upwards to return to the building. A figure was climbing the staircase but at the top, where the stairs would logically re-enter the building, the person was faced with a hopeless blank wall - a strange drawing for a magazine that otherwise was seemingly obsessed with the bush.

Later, seeing Sitta's name again, I tracked down a biography that noted he was a recent

émigré from Czechoslovakia, also the home of Franz Kafka. In the context of Kafka's

Th e Castle, which describes a man's insane bureaucratic journey to enter a castle that

seems constantly out of reach, the drawing of the staircase began to make sense. It embodied a certain type of experience, an experience of striving and frustration. That frustration with Australian landscape architecture still characterises Sitta, but is something you would not detect in reviewing his work. Vladimir Sitta has collaborated widely with landscape architect Richard Weller under the moniker of Room 4.1.3, an enigmatic title that actually refers to a banal office at the University of Western Australia. Their most notable collaboration produced the Garden of Australian Dreams at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra. The sometimes difficult bond between

Sitta and Weller was solidified by a common interest in drawing. On Weller's graduation from the University of New South Wales in the late 1980s, he asked his lecturers Helen Armstrong and Craig Burton where he should work. Weller's nascent work was as much about drawing and art as it was about landscape architecture, so his lecturers were pessimistic, reflecting that in Australian landscape architecture at that time

'design' was a dirty word. They suggested that Weller work overseas. However, in the interim they referred him to a strange designer from eastern Europe by the name of Vladimir Sitta who produced drawings similar to Weller's, and who was working for a Sydney practice detailing furniture in Sydney's eastern suburbs For his first meeting with Sitta, Weller was instructed to bring his drawings. Sitta pulled out his drawings too, and the pair sat at Sitta's desk and enjoyed an impromptu 'show and tell'. Their drawings spoke of a world of significance for landscape architecture beyond any practice, one that reflected the complexity of the cultural landscape well beyond the conventions of bins, seats and paving, which comprised much of landscape architecture practice. Frankly, there were greater things at stake: 'the experience of dwelling on the earth as mortals', as philosopher Martin Heidegger might describe it.

When viewed as an evolving set, Vladimir Sitta's drawings, or 'doodles' as he calls them,

describe a world with some continuity, but one that is different from the world we see around us. To read the drawings is to see evidence of the alien world of Sitta's imagination, a virtual world. Many of Sitta's drawings focus on the clear definition of strange objects placed in the centre of the picture, but at the drawings' edges, in the peripheral vision, there exists enough evidence of a context for the object to describe a physical (or metaphysical) milieu. Perhaps we need to occupy Sitta's drawings

or nightmares in order to interpret them, to scope out the laws of his world. To do so, we

will need to look more closely at his drawings. But it seems like a scary place, so let's not

linger too long. The landscape of Sitta's drawings is generally a sparse environment where the ground and the sky are the major elements. On a surface that is slightly curved or distorted through exaggerated perspective, the focus is usually on a singular element which may be an architectural object or the manipulation of a landform. The objects generally comprise combinations of natural and artificial elements, like trees or elevated platforms of trees or similar, where the objects are cyborgs: fused natural and artificial hybrids that allude to a use, or misuse, of the natural. Few trees, birds and people occupy this landscape; when they do, they feel like the only living things in a dead landscape, like the lone child in his own small world in The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Sitta's drawings are black and white, a feature that lends a sense of pathos or

the Gothic. Much could be made of Sitta's drawings by Jungian psychoanalysis since many of them feature religious content, the cross being a common element, treated in many different ways. Sitta is not a Christian and sees the cross as a powerful and common symbol in many cultures. So, for him, the cross is a gestalt, a clear logical figure of wholeness. In his drawings the cross is given numerous renditions and many crosses are misused or misplaced. In some drawings the edges of the cross are frayed into crumbling turf, like a rockface with fissures. The cross drawings are edgy, defiling a known symbol by changing its context in such a way that they reflect back on

its usual sacred interpretation. Other symbolic images appear in Sitta's drawings and signify a vision that also encompasses time. Crows fly in the sky or sit in trees, distant figures walk around the site. Time in this world is slow, significant and about duration: the time taken to invoke a spell, with the sense that something is imminent. This is not time as conveyed by banal landscaping - for Sitta, all time is heavy and pregnant with unfolding meaning. This aspect of his drawn world is evident in the assumption that you (a viewer) are watching the scene unfold. All his drawings use a twopoint perspective which Sitta repeats with great prowess as a freehand artist. Objects in the space tend to come from the left, growing larger as they move into the view frame. This perspective is about controlling the view, about controlling interpretation, even as that interpretation is vague or enigmatic. The format of a drawing is important because drawing is an activity, a process conducted in time where the minutiae of the steps in the process inform the end-product. Sitta's drawings are not about craft. Generally his drawings are on A4 bond paper, the kind of paper used in a printer or photocopier. Drawn in black ink, they are stored in plastic-sleeved presentation binders. The drawings are not stored in a grandiose folio like artworks but filed as professional working documents. This is not surprising when one considers that landscape architects produce drawings for a living. However, these drawings are not strictly professional, and few of Sitta's drawings are of gardens per se. Consequently there is a disjunction between the drawings' subjective content as personal expressionistic creations and their mode of production and storage as objective office documents. This disjunction between the personal and the professional characterises much of the interest of Sitta's work. The drawings are not produced for a

specifi c project but are site-less in terms of the 'real' world, dwelling instead in Sitta's

macabre universe. Faced with a new project, Sitta flicks through his binders and chooses

an appropriate drawing. So each site becomes an opportunity to test a distinct concept, a

concept separate from site or client. The site then represents a real place to deploy what

was a virtual idea. Sitta smiles and agrees when I suggest that the drawings may be

cheap therapy. The translation of 'Drawing Therapy' to 'Garden Porn' is an interesting and occasionally disappointing process[...]

It is interesting and endlessly frustrating to Sitta that he has primarily undertaken residential garden designs in Australia because, as a landscape architect, his

passionate interest is the design of public space. His main built public project in

Australia is the Garden of Australian Dreams, developed with Richard Weller. However,

overseas, both separately and together, he and Weller have won countless competitions

for public spaces. Few of these competition designs have been built, but all feature some

of the symbolic content that regularly features in Sitta's drawings, together with rational and conservative urban design strategies. Sitta can be scathing about working for public

authorities in Australia, which he characterizes as being devoid of strong personalities who will foster innovative projects, lamenting that there is no 'public Medici', no patron. These comments reflect a belief that design is a subjective not objective affair and designers, with their individual visions, should be supported by their clients. Sitta's rationality in urban design reflects what could seem a contradiction in his work:

extreme pragmatism. In all of Sitta's built work and also his critique of work by his peers

(which can be scathing; for example, describing a colleague's work as 'a urinal with a view'), Sitta expects perfection in the realisation of the design. This intense interest in landscape detailing partly explains his popularity with architects who are often shocked by the poor detailing abilities of landscape architects. The irony of Sitta's own propositions in drawings being fanciful and often physically impossible, while at the same time being obsessed with realisation, is yet another of the contradictions

in his design work. Australia is a country of immigrants and Sitta is yet another 'wog', as he calls himself, even if his provenance is different from the norm. While Australians are obsessed with the sense of homeliness in this landscape, Sitta's work in drawings and gardens builds places around the notion of placelessness and suggests that even when at home we occupy an 'uncanny' or 'unhomely' zone which does not allow us to be complacent about our location but keeps us aware of our occupation of a landscape and the experience of being here, anywhere.