Chris Johnstone is the Project Manager and Landscape Architecture Consultant for the Power Plants Phytoremediation Garden. The director of Bosqué Studio, he began his career as a master gardener before graduating from RMIT’s landscape architectural program in 2000 and became a registered Landscape Architect in 2005. Since its inception in 2014 Chris and Bosqué Studio have continued being involved in projects ranging across a wide variety contexts and communities from public domain projects such as the design and installation of RMIT’s European campus in Barcelona, through to a Public Domain Audit and Strategy for the Callaghan Campus of the University of Newcastle, and on to an AILA award winning design for the Children’s Garden at the National Arboretum Canberra. To a Botanical Gardens business and masterplanning projects in the Gold Coast, Queensland and Honiara, Solomon Islands and Community and research projects such as the Power Plants Phytoremediation gardens in Sydney and Newcastle and the St Andrews Black Saturday bushfire memorial in Kinglake, Victoria both undertaken with Dr SueAnne Ware.
As a landscape architect Chris works through five modes of practice. These modes are fundamental to the way he approaches design and connects with the landscape. Chris believes that our relationships to physical and cultural landscapes defines our deeply held connections and regards for site or place. He proposes that landscape is experienced through kinaesthetic movement and across time. Landscapes are in a constant state of becoming, and our relationships with them mirrors this. When designing, Chris crafts and conceives of landscapes across a multitude of scales; understanding that human and bio-physical ecologies are enchained and intertwined. To express this he privileges and celebrates the ever evolving space of plants interwoven with human mircro-climates. Chris aims to interrogate and further articulate each of these conceptual ideologies through the Bosqué Studio practice. To be able to best realise these modes of practice Bosqué Studio will always strive to work collaboratively with the best people and research available to enable a considered and informed approach for the Client and project.
