‘Majlis Garden: San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice’ with Todd Longstaffe-Gowan
£25.00
Event date and time: 21 March 2021, 6.45pm
Tickets: Friends £20, others £25, doors open 6.30, lecture 6.45pm (ticket price includes a glass of wine after the lecture)
NB – Please log in to your Members’ account to access the Friends’ discount for this event.
At the Society of Antiquaries, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BE
Todd will discuss the ephemeral garden he created at San Giorgio Maggiore for the 2021 Venice Architectural Biennale. His fruit, flower and vegetable garden was designed with a view to forming a striking and alluring landscape setting for the Majlis – a temporary installation in the monastery’s garden; its aim was to celebrate the pre-eminent role of Venice in the introduction and dispersal of exotic flora from the Orient. The garden received wide international acclaim as a contemporary and playful response to the Venetian impulse to gather, appropriate and display the rare, the useful, the exotic and the unusual.
Todd Longstaffe-Gowan is a landscape architect, historian, author and collector. He has an international design practice based in London, is a lecturer at New York University (London), Gardens Adviser to Historic Royal Palaces, and President of the London Gardens Trust. His forthcoming book English Garden Eccentrics: three hundred years of extraordinary groves, burrowings, mountains and menageries shall be published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in association with Yale University Press (UK) in April 2022.