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Anette Freytag
Anette Freytag is an award-winning scholar, educator and critic. Her research focuses on 19th- and 20th-century landscape architecture. Her quest is to bridge the gap between landscape history and contemporary practice. Lately, she is focusing on walking and spatial justice. Before joining the Department of Landscape Architecture at Rutgers as Associate Professor in the Fall of 2016, Anette has taught undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students at Universities in Zürich, Basel, Innsbruck, Rapperswil and Leuven. She was promoted to Professor in 2020.
Her latest book The Landscape of Dieter Kienast published by gta Zurich in 2021 offers the first and comprehensive critical examination of Kienast’s work and has been awarded the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize 2022. Dieter Kienast (1945–1998) is a key figure in European landscape architecture. Amidst a striking change in societal understandings of nature, he sought a synthesis between design and ecology in the 1970s. He designed spaces to make the dissolving opposition between city and countryside legible and to enable aesthetic experience to help cope with increasingly complex everyday life. The German edition of the book Dieter Kienast. Stadt und Landschaft lesbar machen (Zurich: gta 2016) has received numerous awards.
Anette is also the editor and main author of The Gardens of La Gara. An 18th century estate in Geneva with gardens designed by Erik Dhont and a labyrinth by Markus Raetz (Zurich: Scheidegger& Spiess 2018) — a case study to explore, through the prism of one estate, all aspects of garden culture. It is also available in German and French and has received the European Garden Book Award 2019.
Anette’s work has appeared in Topos, Studies in the History of Gardens and Landscape Design, Gartenkunst, Garten + Landschaft, and others. She is co-author of Pamphlet 15 Topology (gta Zurich 2012) and co-editor of Landscript 3 Topology (Jovis Berlin 2013) and she has contributed chapters to several award-winning books. Her work has been supported by the Volkswagen Foundation, the Lucius and Annemarie Burckhardt Foundation, the ETH Department of Architecture, the Federation of Swiss Landscape Architects (BSLA-FSAP), the Christoph Merian Foundation and ProHelvetia.
Apart from her work in academia, Anette founded the research bureau ville.jardin.paysage in 2001 and delivered a highly regarded study on the garden of Stoclet House, created by Josef Hoffmann, 1905-1911. Her study resulted in the site becoming classified in 2005 and contributed to its inscription on the World Heritage list.
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View list of publications and lectures
anette.freytag@rutgers.edu