Queen Victoria Gardens

Explore the potential of craftsmanship to construct productive and meaningful relationships between people and regional landscapes, using Queen’s Meadow Country House in Tono, Japan as a central case study.

Located in a region known for its strong horse culture, Queen’s Meadow attracts a steady stream of visitors who come to experience an alternative to their highly urban lifestyles. Visiting requires guests to actively participate and construct projects that respond to the site’s specific values. Queen’s Meadow acts as a guide for how to revitalise Japan’s many abandoned rural areas, as it focuses on practices such as natural burial, camping, and cultural workshops that encourage people to become more empowered and resilient.

Come hear from a multi-disciplinary panel of landscape architects, architects, and designers as they discuss cultural relationships to innovation, crafting of landscape systems, regenerative processes of craft, and negotiating the traditional and the contemporary in material practices.

Collaborators:

Jillian Walliss is an associate professor in Landscape Architecture at the University of Melbourne. Her research explores the relationship between theory, culture, and contemporary design practice. She works across multiple platforms including digital media, exhibition and festival curation, guest editing of books and journals, along with writing for a wide range of academic and professional journals. She is the co-author of The Big Asian Book of Landscape and Architecture (2020) and Landscape Architecture and Digital Technologies: Re-conceptualising Design and Making (2016). In 2023 she co-curated the ‘Landscape Architecture as Changemakers’ exhibition with Heike Rahmann and Saran Kim.

Heike Rahmann is a senior lecturer in Landscape Architecture at RMIT University. Her research focuses on innovative design techniques and contemporary urbanism practices that combine theory, technology, and urban ecology. She has established strong partnerships with industry, community and government bodies in Australia and Asia, especially in Japan and Singapore. Heike is the co-author of three books including Tokyo Void: Possibilities in Absence (2014) and The Big Asian Book of Landscape Architecture (2020). Her recent project, ‘Landscape Architects as Changemakers,’ with Jillian Walliss and Saran Kim, is a multi-media exploration of award-winning design practices in Australia and Japan.

Nancy Ji is a Chinese-born designer, architect and lecturer in Architectural Design at the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne. She studied architecture at the University of Auckland; University of California, Berkeley; University of Melbourne and Delft University of Technology. In 2019, Nancy received the Monbukagakusho (MEXT) Scholarship from the Japanese government to undertake doctoral studies at Keio University in Tokyo. After living in Tokyo, Nancy spent over a year living on a small island in the Seto Inland Sea conducting ethnographic fieldwork on the lives of young urbanites who have moved to the countryside.

Sarah Teasley works across social history and design research. Her research focuses on two areas: how class and gender shape power and equity in design and making, and how people work creatively with new biotechnology and materials today and in the past. She is the author of Designing Modern Japan (2022), co-editor of Design and Society in Modern Japan (2016) and Global Design History (2011), and the author of numerous articles and book chapters on design practice in Japan. Her research is highly collaborative and transdisciplinary, applying methods across design research, history and cognate fields. She is a professor of Design at RMIT University.

Saran Kim is a graduate of architecture at Architectus and a research collaborator at the University of Melbourne. Originally from Japan, Saran’s design approach has been shaped particularly by studies of traditional Japanese architecture and Australian Indigenous knowledge and epistemologies that embrace the deepening of relationships with landscapes. Having an academic background in both architecture and landscape architecture, Saran played an important role in the ‘Landscape Architects as Changemakers’ exhibition at the Melbourne School of Design, interviewing and translating Japanese landscape architects and contributing to exhibition curation, graphic design, web design and multimedia production.