Preface

Walker, Peter; Simo, Melanie Louise

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Preface

Peter Walker, Melanie Louise Simo

Invisible Gardens: The Search for Modernism in the American Landscape

~In 1975, after almost twenty years of continuous professional activity, I returned to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The years of practice had been intense in both growth and change. American corporations had returned to peacetime, expanded their power, and consolidated their self-image in a series of great corporate palaces. All levels of...

Author

Peter Walker, Melanie Louise Simo

PublisherMIT Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00070.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-16618

Preface

In 1975, after almost twenty years of continuous professional activity, I returned to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The years of practice had been intense in both growth and change. American corporations had returned to peacetime, expanded their power, and consolidated their self-image in a series of great corporate palaces. All levels of government had also built their images into the environment. The domestic environment had expanded, spreading and extending the prewar metropolitan limits geometrically. Housing developments, shopping centers, schools, and neighborhood parks had multiplied, fostered by federal highway expansion, low-cost mortgages offered by the Federal Housing Authority and the Veterans Administration, and state and local bonding. Public and private colleges and universities had quickly outgrown their prewar facilities, and public housing designers and planners had attacked the problems of the inner cities at a scale rivaled only by European and Asian postwar rebuilding.

And yet the modern postwar environmental nirvana predicted by the design teachers and historians of the 1940s and 1950s had not taken visible form. In fact, the 1970s had brought environmental survival itself into question. What had gone wrong? Why had the brave new world failed to arrive?

Teaching is always another form of learning. In the spring of 1977, I offered students of landscape architecture a modest seminar to inquire into the specific works of a group of contemporary landscape architects, artists, and architects who had practiced and taught just before and after World War II. We began to question what these designers had done, the social and artistic assumptions they had made, their cultural influences, and the impacts they had been able to make. Each student would research one or several of these key figures and present the findings. Then the class would discuss the results. The seminar grew, becoming a lecture and discussion class in 1978. Among the key issues reviewed were the artistic context or style that each of our “heroes” represented. In 1979 Melanie Simo joined me in this exploration, broadening the presentations of the artistic references and also deepening the specific historical information on our subjects. Later Melanie developed this material into courses of landscape architectural history that she offered between 1982 and 1989 at the Radcliffe Seminars, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

This book is focused on the results of those years of work and our collaboration. Our view of many of our subjects has evolved and changed through discussions both within and beyond the classroom, and our interests have changed as well. From an original intent to inform students (and ourselves) of the works of contemporary designers, we have moved on to a deeper interest in some specific questions. Why is such satisfying, or beautiful, or critically important work not better known? Why has the work had so little currency? In effect, why has it so often seemed invisible?

Many of these designers are still living. Most were alive at the beginning of our investigations. Whenever possible, we have talked with them or their close collaborators. Over the past forty or fifty years, a fair amount has been written by, or about, some of these individuals. As a group, however, they are not well known, and the written record of their work and thought remains uneven—now abundant, now sparse, often inaccessible.

This book is not a collection of short biographies. Rather, we have focused on some aspects of our subjects’ lives and traced some lines of development we feel are important to American landscape architecture as a whole. (We recognize that I play a part, though a small part, of this story, and we have tried to balance this obvious advantage and disadvantage in our exposition.) Whatever the redeeming elements of this book, I believe the most significant may be traced to our collaboration, a process of continual, sometimes tenuous, balancing of views.

Most historians freely choose their subject; in the beginning, Melanie did not. Rather, some thirteen years ago, she fell into it as a body of material almost totally new to her: a collection of individuals, ideas, and issues that were exceedingly important to me as a practicing landscape architect and teacher in the field. I was curious about how the pieces of my own education and experience could be put together. I had already constructed a hypothesis and outline and had identified the major figures and issues in the story to be told, from my particular point of view. What I wanted was more information. Who were these figures, after all? What was their contribution to the profession? What did art have to do with it all? And what did it matter? The questions were intriguing. Many years later we agreed to collaborate on a book.

I had sought a coauthor who enjoys probing in odd crannies and undefined places, looking for clues to convoluted problems or enigmas. The time and focus necessary for such probing is not readily available to a practitioner. But as a historian, Melanie insisted that we spend the time, and I agreed. We progressed through joint readings and discussion prior to and during the writing process. In the end, the few moments of modest epiphanies, when suddenly something became clear, have validated the time spent.

We had worked together for quite a while before any problem of defining terms arose. There seemed nothing wrong, for instance, with Norman Newton’s definition of landscape architecture (in Design on the Land, 1971) as “the art—or the science, if preferred—of arranging land, together with the spaces and objects upon it, for safe, efficient, healthful, pleasant human use.”

Problems of terminology arose only when specific instances were called into question. Was Frederick Law Olmsted a “modern” landscape architect, for instance? Insofar as he was responding in fresh, appropriate ways to the conditions—geographical, sociological, technological, political, cultural, and so on—of his site or of the larger environment, he was modern. But in his treatment of pure form and formal relationships—considerations that would become increasingly significant for modern art—he was a fairly traditional, sophisticated designer. Olmsted had a nineteenth-century romantic’s love of rich, bounteous, flowing forms (and materials) that were never meant to be perceived in their own right but, rather, generally experienced as scenery and appreciated in their broad social and cultural context.

In contrast, distinctness, often crisp or hard surfaces, abrupt juxtaposition, asymmetrical balance, and acute attention to things—textures, colors, materials, forms—for their own sake, apart from the mass, are among the most recognizable qualities of modernism. Still, the terms modern and modernism had never been defined to my satisfaction during my years of college, graduate school, and practice of landscape architecture.

For the purposes of this book, we assumed that modernism referred to the movement in literature, music, and the visual and lively arts that can be traced to stirrings in Western Europe and the British Isles in the latter half of the nineteenth century; and that that movement first came to maturity, in architecture, in the work of perhaps a half-dozen individuals, including Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe. In landscape architecture, if there was no commonly understood modernism, we could assume at very least that “modern” landscapes and gardens were perceived to be somehow fresh, original, and appropriate to the place and the time in which they were laid out. We also assumed that the forms of modern painting, sculpture, and architecture, along with their formal and spatial relationships and sometimes their materials, could be indications of at least a modern expression in landscape architecture.

When the issue of methodology arose, we were reminded of Jens Jensen’s belief: that plants, like human beings, have their own individuality. And it is human individuality, more than similarities, that interests Melanie as a historian. Her preferred method of dealing with history is to view a subject through the lens of an individual rather than through the lenses of ideology, morphology, topology, iconography, or any of a number of abstractions ending in -ism. Like my spiritual mentor of many decades, William James, she would rather approach a subject through close examining of pieces—one human being’s actions, thoughts, relations, and their consequences—than try to fashion some unified, all-encompassing whole of a period. And like one of her heroes, Thoreau, she considers no small detail in the life of a person unworthy of attention. Our method, in short, has been to have no method but to look, listen, travel, and seek out the facts and insights needed to tell a story. In this instance, the result is a partial history of a period—partial, in that by no means the whole story is told and in that the story’s framework has been crafted by one who is indeed partial, engaged, and still interested in that story’s expansion, beyond our final page.

A deeper understanding of the achievement of these and other leading landscape architects should follow in time, as individual biographies and critical studies appear. We believe our own efforts will have been worthwhile if this book serves as a catalyst to inquiry and discussion. Among the leading American landscape architects and designers of the twentieth century, which ones (besides our personal heroes) have made outstanding contributions to American art and culture? To what extent have these contributions been visible, generally known, and appreciated? And under what conditions, what motivations, what identities have these individuals flourished—as artists, spokesmen, theorists, educators, visionaries, reformers, leaders, catalysts? These are among the questions that we have tried to answer.

Peter Walker

San Francisco, August 1992

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