TWO ADELAIDE VILLAS

摘要

Third nature: "those human interventions that go beyond what is required by the necessities or practice of agriculture or urban settlement... some conjunction of metaphysical experience with physicalforms, specifically some aesthetic endeavour - the wish or need to make a site beautiful." When reflecting on Taylor Cullity Lethlean's (TCL) Adelaide and North Adelaide villa gardens in the context of "third nature," it seems fitting that when Jacopo Bonfadio and Bartolomeo Taegio first coined the concept in the sixteenth century (seemingly at a similar time but independently of each other), they were referring to villa gardens. Though the Renaissance villas of Bonfadio and Taegio may seem an unlikely connection with two twenty-first-century urban Australian gardens, it is the contemporary play on Renaissance and other historic garden styles that defines each of these modern landscapes, creating a depth and playfulness rarely seen in Australian domestic settings.