ELEVATING THE BOTANICAL

Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre rooftop spaces Melbourne, Victoria

Rush Wright Associates

In comparison to their European and North American counterparts, Australian landscape architects have been relatively slow in getting rooftop gardens off the ground. Until the last decade of the twentieth century, Australia’s wide brown lands and sweeping plains had appeared adequate in accommodating the nation’s comparatively small population’s wish to live within the quarter-acre block suburban myth near public parks and gardens. The spike in the new millennium of an increasingly urbanized population, in particularly in Sydney and Melbourne (whose populations each reached 5 million in 2016 and 2018, respectively) necessitated an increase in design responses to ameliorate the deleterious effects of urbanization, not least in readdressing the decline in public open space. Over the past twenty years