Australian Garden Cranbourne

RESEARCH BACKGROUND: Australian Garden is a major botanic garden on a 25-hectare site: the largest botanic garden devoted to Australian flora. Set on a former sand quarry, the garden brings together horticulture, architecture, ecology, and art, allowing visitors to follow a metaphorical journey through the Australian landscape, from the desert to the coastal fringe. Perry Lethlean, as a Director of Taylor Cullity Lethlean (TCL), led the project in collaboration with Paul Thompson. RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION: This project builds on established design principles, construction practices, and community recreation patterns, while addressing contemporary environmental and cultural issues to bring a new type of garden experience to visitors. Its completion comes at a time when Botanic Gardens worldwide are questioning existing research and recreational paradigms and refocusing anew on messages of landscape conservation and a renewed interest in meaningful visitor engagement. TCL's Garden highlights the tension between the natural landscape and our human impulse to change it. This tension is not eliminated; rather it is the driving creative impulse for exploration, expression and interpretation of the landscape and its flora. This project demonstrates Lethlean's contributions to contemporary public space design that connect to a site's context, its specificity and nuances, to elicit meaning and interpretive experience for the public. RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE: Australian Garden received the prestigious 'Landscape of the Year' Award at the 2013 World Architecture Festival. It also received the 2014 Australian Institute of Landscape Architecture (AILA) National Excellence Award for Design; the 2013 AILA Victoria Design in Landscape Architecture Award for Excellence; and the 2013 Melbourne Design Awards for Landscape Design - Commercial. It received critical reviews in Architecture Australia, The Monthly, The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and ArchDaily, amongst others.