Nicole King, MS

Nicole Theresa King is an interdisciplinary designer and researcher working at the intersection of cultural studies, speculative design, and materialist ecologies. Her work focuses on landscape as medium, material, and infrastructure, with a particular interest in the material and symbolic roles of plants. She understands horticulture as a precursor to biotechnology and situates designed ecologies as active agents in the coproduction of cultural and ecological futures. During her stay at the RCC, she will work on her monograph The Anthropocene’s Post-Oasis: Designing Nature and Landscape in Southern California, 1945–65, which will examine horticultural imaginaries and their ecological afterlives in Southern California. King is currently completing a PhD in art history, theory, and criticism with a concentration in art practice and a specialization in anthropogeny (human origins) at the University of California San Diego.

The Anthropocene's Post-Oasis, a book project, examines how horticultural and architectural practices in twentieth-century Southern California produced new cultural landscapes and continue to shape emerging ecological imaginaries. It asks how modernist design contributed to a “semi-tropical” nature, a regional climate identity based on botanical abundance, infrastructural control, and horticultural exceptionalism. It explores the colonialist roots of a design paradigm invoking an “oasis” and how it was mobilized as both metaphor and spatial technology to naturalize ecologically engineered environments. Through four typologies—residential garden, city park, productive landscape, and a desert ecological habitat—the study investigates how landscape in Southern California operated not only as symbolic or aesthetic form but also as material interface between ideology and ecology, labor and leisure, extraction and technology. Drawing on archival research, visual analysis, and site-based inquiry, the project treats landscape as a historically produced material form—shaped by technological, i.e., horticultural systems—through which climate narratives are constructed as much as contested. This study will contribute to interdisciplinary scholarship in the fields of art and design history, landscape studies, and the environmental humanities.

RCC Research Project: The Anthropocene’s Post-Oasis: Designing Nature and Landscape in Southern California, 1945–65

Selected Publications:

• “Fire in the Semitropics: Palms and the Crisis Technology of Southern California Gardens.” ifk now 25, no. 2 (2025): 4–5.
• with Lilli Lička and Ulrike Krippner. “Public Space and Social Ideals: Revisiting Vienna’s Donaupark.” In Defining Landscape Democracy: A Path to Spatial Justice, edited by Shelley Egoz, Karsten Jørgensen, and Deni Ruggeri. Edward Elgar, 2018. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781786438348.
• with Lilli Lička and Ulrike Krippner. “Denkmalwürdiger Park ohne Denkmalschutz” [Monumental Park Without Monument Preservation]. Garten + Landschaft, February 2015, 26–30.
• “The Wilderness Downtown: The Indeterminate Nature of Johannesburg’s Mine Dumps.” In Specifics: Discussing Landscape Architecture, edited by Christiane Sörensen and Karoline Liedtke. JOVIS, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783868598803. (published as Nicole Theresa Raab)
• “Das Wunder von Wien. Mediale Sentimente und Sensationen einer Gartenschau” [Viennese Wonder: Media Sentiments and Sensations of a Horticultural Exposition]. In WIG 64. Die grüne Nachkriegsmoderne [Vienna International Garden Show 1964: Green Postwar Modernism], edited by Lilli Lička, Martina Nußbaumer, and Ulrike Krippner. Metroverlag, 2014.
• “Blütenträume aus der Pflanzenfabrik. Der moderne Freizeitgarten im Spiegel der WIG 64” [Floral Dreams from the Plant Factory: The Modern Leisure Garden as Reflected in the Vienna International Garden Show 1964]. In WIG 64. Die grüne Nachkriegsmoderne [Vienna International Garden Show 1964: Green Postwar Modernism], edited by Lilli Lička, Martina Nußbaumer, and Ulrike Krippner. Metroverlag, 2014.