After landscape

Reflecting on the life and legacy of landscape architecture academic Marieluise Jonas – an educator who inspired many with her passion for and understanding of Asian urbanism.

Celebrating the life and legacy of the late landscape architecture academic Marieluise Jonas. Reflections by Heike Rahmann and Jillian Walliss.

For some, life takes a defined course from school to university and then work, often in the same city and usually in the same country. This did not apply to Marieluise Jonas. Her desire to experience the new and unknown led her from her native Germany to the United States, Japan and finally to Australia, where she spent the last eight years of her life. But it is her work in Japan that will be her greatest legacy to landscape architecture and the design community. Her decade-long exploration of the intricacies of Japanese urbanism and her more recent contribution to tsunami-affected coastal villages offer students, practitioners and communities valuable knowledge and lessons.

Marieluise’s father, who travelled extensively for work, encouraged her interest in Japan from an early age. Her first encounter with a foreign country was in the USA,

where as a highschool exchange student in Arkansas she happened to shake the hand of then governor Bill Clinton. In 1995, after finishing highschool and a short exploration studying sociology at the University of Kiel in Germany, she commenced a two-year apprenticeship as a landscape contractor. This training laid the foundation of her career in landscape architecture. It was at this time that Marieluise and her partner, Heike Rahmann, first met. In 1997 Marieluise began her landscape architecture degree and soon, being bored by the focus on Eurocentric landscape architecture, she looked to expand her cultural understandings of landscape and design through an internship abroad.

In 2001 Marieluise was awarded a government-funded scholarship aimed at professional and personal development overseas. With Japan a major economic

partner, the German government was particularly supportive of young Germans working in Japan, offering specialized training in cross-cultural communication and diplomacy. Working for six months in the office of Tokyo-based architect Kisho Kurokawa, a renowned modernist architect who co-founded the Metabolism Movement in the 1960s, she quickly discovered that landscape architecture as presented in Germany did not exist in Japan. Instead, Tokyo exposed her to the cultural and spatial complexity of one of the world’s most intriguing megacities. The density and lack of open space raised an appreciation for the small and hidden moments in the city that are not easily accessible to the short-term visitor. This attitude toward unpretentious qualities paired with Marieluise’s curiosity to unpack the underlying social conditions of spatial design and inhabitation formed a constant presence in her academic work.