Modern Landscape Architecture: A Critical Review

These twenty-two essays provide a rich forum for assessing the tenets, accomplishments, and limits of modernism in landscape architecture and for formulating ideas about possible directions for the future of the discipline.

During the 1930s Garrett Eckbo, Dan Kiley, and JamesRose began to integrate modernist architectural ideas into their work and to design a landscape more in accord with the life and sensibilities of their time. Together with Thomas Church, whose gardens provided the setting for California living, they laid the foundations for a modern American landscape design.

This first critical assessment of modem landscape architecture brings together seminal articles from the 1930s and 1940s by Eckbo, Kiley, Rose, Fletcher Steele, and Christopher Tunnard, and includes contributions by contemporary writers and designers such as Peirce Lewis, Catherine Howett, John Dixon Hunt, Peter Walker, and Martha Schwartz who examine the historical and cultural framework within which modern landscape designers have worked.

There are also essays by Lance Neckar, Reuben Rainey, Gregg Bleam, Michael Laurie, and Marc Treib that discuss the designs and legacy of the Americans Tunnard, Eckbo, Church, Kiley, and Robert Irwin. Dorothee Imbert takes up Pierre-Emile Legrain and French modernist gardens of the 1920s, and Thorbjorn Andersson reviews experiments with stylized naturalism developed by Erik Glemme and others in the Stockholm park system.

Marc Treib is Professor of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley.