Cultivating modernism
![]() |
Reading the modern garden 1917-71
|
Cultivating Modernism will be an inspiration to all with an interest in gardens, books, and the recent past - with Richard Aitken, Melbourne-based architect, historian and curator.
Exploring modernism from the perspective of the Australian garden, author and curator Richard Aitken will chart garden making from World War One until the dawn of environmentalism in the 1960s and 1970s. His lecture will showcase garden design during a turbulent period from pre-war European functionalism to a more relaxed post-war Californian modernism, showing how the garden was a necessary prop for modernism's reality.
A vital journey into our recent past.
Visit the recently launched Cultivating modernism website for more insights into this fascinating period of garden design.
![]() |
![]() |
Co-presented by the Hawke Centre and the Architecture Museum, UniSA, with support from the Art Deco and Modernism Society
Cultivating Modernism is an Australian Garden History Society touring exhibition
Richard Aitken
Richard Aitken is a Melbourne-based architect, historian, and curator. He has prepared conservation plans for many of Australia's most significant historic gardens, including Adelaide's botanic gardens.
National Trust of Australia awarded him an honorary membership (2006), for advocacy role in the identification and conservation of significant gardens and designed landscapes.
He is currently co-editor of Australian Garden History, the quarterly journal of the Australian Garden History Society. His books include The Oxford Companion to Australian Gardens (2002), Gardenesque (2004), Botanical Riches (2006), Seeds of Change (2006), and The Garden of Ideas (2010), and Cultivating Modernism (2013).
Exhibitions: Cultivating modernism
Monday 17 February – Monday 31 March
Cultivating Modernism comes alive through a kaleidoscopic mix from rarely seen books, prints, and ephemera charting garden making during this period. More information.
UniSA's Architecture Museum will host a complementary exhibition, drawing on rare art deco prints and publication of French exhibitions. Cultivating modernism: French garden style of the 1920s and 1930s will provide a rich coverage of Cubist and other decorative approaches to garden design.
.
![]() |
![]() |
Cultivating Modernism is an Australian Garden History Society touring exhibition
Exhibition partners: the Hawke Centre UniSA, Architecture Museum at UniSA, The University of Melbourne Library, and National Trust of Australia (Victoria)
Project partners and supporters: Melbourne University Publishing, The University of South Australia Library, Heritage Council Victoria, and the Art Deco and Modernism Society
While the views presented by speakers within the Hawke Centre public program are their own and are not necessarily those of either the University of South Australia or The Hawke Centre, they are presented in the interest of open debate and discussion in the community and reflect our themes of: strengthening our democracy - valuing our diversity - and building our future.
The copying and reproduction of any transcripts within the Hawke Centre public program is strictly forbidden without prior arrangements.