The Paradise Spectacle Fabric studio rejects the garden as a passive retreat, instead embracing it as an active site of resistance, speculation, and public discourse.

Digging into the concept of “paradise” as a cultural ideal and ecological construct, the studio collective explored how foundational myths and ideals continue to inform how we design, inhabit, and value gardens today. Through the lens of “spectacle” - with the ambition to unsettle inherited ideas about gardens, urban green spaces, and the constraints of convention - we critically examined exhibitions and show gardens as political and cultural formats for staging ideas and sparking critical discourse. Drawing from historic movements, contemporary garden festivals and recent exhibitions individual enquiries - sensitive, often experimental, landscape-led design propositions - embed into the “fabric” of urban Scotland to address the particular conditions of our landscapes, work with complex socio-environmental ideas, provoke new perspectives, and foster community care.

Top image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.