Modern Landscape Architecture: A Critical Review

Book Overview

Twenty-two essays that provide a 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

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. Doroth e Imbert takes up Pierre-Emile Legrain and French modernist gardens of the 1920s, and Thorbj rn Andersson reviews experiments with stylized naturalism developed by Erik Glemme and others in the Stockholm park system.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262700514
• ISBN13: 9780262700511
• Release Date: July 1994
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 306 Pages
• Weight: 2.16 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 8.5" x 10.9"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Understanding modern garden design

This book is a rare find since it is a collection of articles which help explain the origins of the Modern Garden . Through it you can trace the formation of midcentury design . Through it you can learn what Modernist garden designers were reacting to in traditional garden design and architecture , and discover how influential Landscape Architects like Thomas Church and James C.Rose used this new "freedom". The book is witty and the viewpoints are diverse. It should be required reading if you are training as a garden designer or a Landscape Architect in part because it a corrective to the usual theoretical approaches .

Lagging behind architecture, but finally catching up.

The editor, Marc Treib, said in the introduction that ideas in the field of landscape architecture is 15 years behind architecture(and architure is behind art for another 15 years). But for the history of modernism, landscape architecture seemed to be behind architecture for several decades. Finally, landscape architecture has its own history.This book can be read along with "Invisible Gardens" (MIT Press, 1994)written by art critics Melaine Simo and landscape architect Peter Walker.That would makes a general picture of what modernism in landscape architecture is like.But what happened after modernism? For those who really interested in the subject of modernism/postmodernism in landscape architecture, i suggest them to read essays in Landscape Journal, e.g "Cubist space, Volumetric space, and Landscape Architecture" by Patrick M. Condon(spring, 1988),who called for a transition of design paradigms of landscape architecture in the late 20th century ; or "Form, Meaning, and Expression in Landscape Architecture" by Laurie Olin, who had criticized some important classical, modern and contemporary landscape architectural works. That would makes a more comprehensive and in-depth exploration in the changing ideas of landscape architecture. It's kind of pity that "a critical review" is just an anthology of pappers in one single symposium(and some historical documents) that some important concepts like Condon's were elimated. So a more coherent and critical history of modern(even 20th century) landscape architecture is still expectative.