Sarah Cowles

Jury 2022 /
Ruderal
ruderal.com

Sarah Cowles is the Director of Ruderal, based in Tbilisi. Ruderal is a landscape architecture and planning studio focused on the emerging development markets in the Caucasus region.

For Cowles, every site project is a forum to negotiate and invent new relationships of culture and ecology. She leads multidisciplinary teams to realize complex landscape-focused projects in international contexts. Her expertise in landscape planning and design spans a range of scales, including master planning for cultural institutions, ecological rehabilitation of industrial, natural disaster, and mining sites, and urban and residential landscape design. Her prior experience includes practice with TLS Landscape Architecture, where she coordinated site design of the US Consulate in Guangzhou, and large-scale urban redevelopment projects in the San Francisco Bay Area, including Treasure Island and Hunters Point Shipyard. As a professor of Landscape Architecture in professional programs in the United States, she has held positions at The Ohio State University, Washington University, and most recently, The University of Southern California. She is a Fulbright Scholar and recently completed a Fulbright Specialist Grant in Tbilisi. Cowles received her Master of Landscape Architecture from Harvard University’s GSD and her BFA from the California College of the Arts.

more by Ruderal

LILA 2023 Special Mention in Private Gardens
Betania Forest Garden

Ruderal

At first glance, this garden completely ignores or even challenges all the dogmas of garden design ‘by the book’. However, at a closer look, it offers a number of appropriate statements and manages to remain open to interpretations.

The oversized stairs seem to have no excuse, yet they embody a sculptural dimension whilst providing seating in a peculiar grove of densely planted trees and shrubs. More importantly, the stairs lead out of the garden, through a small door in a wooden fence, into the forest, where a ‘forest garden’ ambience is achieved by almost nothing – a table and a hammock.

There are several different dialogues between pastureland and forest, private and public, an object and its context, inside and outside, but above all, between a garden as a notion and its relation to the surroundings. The design seems to be based on questioning, yet it feels entirely confident at the same time.

This garden is full of deliberate contradictions, contrasts, beautiful strangeness, and the jury was inspired by the scope of questions it poses with so little.

Tbilisi Urban Forest

Ruderal

In 2020, the City of Tbilisi initiated a plan to diversify and improve the health of the Mtatsminda Urban forest and enhance public access with trails and facilities. Ruderal adapted the initial analytical work of botanists, zoologists, geographers and environmental scientist to create detailed spatial plans of coherent patches of plant communities keyed to different […]

LILA 2021 Winner of the Special Jury Award
Arsenal Oasis

Ruderal

Arsenal Oasis is an experimental project that in deals with found objects, most visibly, with the phenomenon of a broken pipe that provides water. The surface is reshaped to invite water and makes the planting of trees possible. Because the debris is left in place, the process of change is visible and readable. This newfound and unique roughness reflects a relevant dialogue between what was, what is, and the suggestion of what ought to be. The project addresses wider spatial issues in Tbilisi and will hopefully act as a catalyst to spark positive change regarding neglected areas in the city.