Julian Raxworthy PhD

Julian Raxworthy is a Landscape Architect from Australia with 25 years practice and academic experience. Initially working as a gardener & landscaper, he trained as a horticulturalist at Ryde TAFE, later becoming a landscape architect, graduating with his undergraduate degree (with honours) and research master’s degree (by design) in landscape architecture, both from RMIT, Australia. He has a PhD from the University of Queensland, where he is an Honorary Associate Professor with the ATCH (Architecture, Theory, Criticism and History) Research Centre. He is Associate Professor & Discipline Lead: Landscape Architecture at the University of Canberra.

As a registered landscape architect in Australia, Julian worked extensively with Aspect Studios, both in Melbourne where he helped develop the practice as Design Manager, and in Sydney, where he co-founded their internationally recognised Sydney Studio. Later, he worked as Principal Landscape Architect for award-winning architecture practices such as Donovan Hill in Brisbane (now part of Bligh Voller Neild), and most recently for Wolff Architects, in Cape Town, where he is also a registered landscape architect, in South Africa.

As an academic, he has been tenured faculty at RMIT University, Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane and at the University of Cape Town, in South Africa, where he has taught into landscape architecture, urban design and architecture programs. He was also steering committee member for the M.Phil (Southern Urbanism) for the African Centre for Cities (ACC).  He has presented key note lectures at the IV European Biennial of Landscape Architecture in Barcelona, LOCUS ISTE in Denmark and EASY GOING, at the Academie van Bouwkunst, Amsterdam. He has also taught internationally, notably at the University of Virginia, where he organised a Myles H.Thaler symposium and was visiting professor, but also as a guest at universities in Europe, including three times at the École Nationale Supérieure de Paysage (ENSP) Versailles, where he was recently Visiting Professor in Fall 2019. In 2020, he was part of the Sylvester Baxter Lecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design “Plants in the Design Imagination”, where he will also be Design Critic, running studio and a seminar in the Fall.

A co-founder of Kerb, the student landscape architecture journal from RMIT (now in its 26th edition), he writes regularly about contemporary landscape projects, in Australia for Landscape Architecture Australia, Monument, Architecture Australia and Architectural Review Australia, and internationally in Topos, SCAPE and LAM. In 2004, he co-edited The MESH Book: Landscape & Infrastructure, published by RMIT Press, and in 2011 Sun publishers in Amsterdam published Sunburnt: Landscape Architecture in Australia, which he co-authored. His most recent book is Overgrown: practices between landscape architecture and gardening, which was published in 2018 by The MIT Press, and was supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. He has lectured widely on the book, first in 2018 on the east coast USA at Harvard GSD, the University of Pennsylvania, Penn State, Cornell University, as well as at the Graham Foundation in Chicago, and in 2019 on the west coast USA at University of Southern California, Cal Poly San Louis Obispo and at the University of Oregon, and also in Australia, at the University of Queensland, University of Adelaide, University of Technology Sydney, and as a keynote at the 2019 Festival of Landscape Architecture in Melbourne. His next book, which will be published by 2024, is entitled “Latent City” the landscape architecture of land tenure”.