Light Volumes

About this book

Astonishing and playful: the artful landscapes of Monica Gora. Landscape architecture can be a discipline of planning that creates everyday worlds just as architecture does or it can assert its position as an art form and produce extraordinary works that take on communicative tasks. Monika Gora's oeuvre is based on nearly twenty years of work as a landscape architect and artist based in Malmo, Sweden, which has produced numerous works in Scandinavia and Central Europe, which have been awarded many prizes and been published internationally. Moving beyond the seriousness of classical landscape architecture, Gora's work reveals a playful approach to the environment and proves that the built landscape need not be a deadly serious matter but rather is there for the senses: for astonishment, brooding, an aha or a laugh, somewhere between intellect and sensibility, beyond the materialism of garden and landscape architecture and far from the conceptualism of museum art. This is demonstrated, for example, by her amorphous light objects called "Jimmies", which provide white or colored light for playgrounds, housing colonies, while also inviting people to sit or climb on them.