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modern
and the
revised eaition
 modern
gardens
and the
revised edition

by Elizabeth B. Kassler

The Museum o Modem Art, New York

acknowledgments
This book would not exist without Arthur Drexler, Director of the Museum's Department of
Architecture and Design, who not only proposed it, but was generous with advice and encour-
agement during its preparation; and it is doubtfid that he would have proposed it if I had not
previously written about water for John Knox Shear, late editor of the Architecliiral Record.
Armando Salas Portugal's photographs of Barragan's work were obtained by Mildred Con-
Museum's Associate Director of Graphic Design, through the good offices of Max
stantine, the
Some of the material on Burle Marx caine from Anthony Walmsley
Cetto and Mathias Goeritz.
and Lota Macedo-Soares, on Denmark from Richard Cripps, on Sweden from Charles Agle;
and Sven Selow produced the plan of the Forest Cemetery, photographed from Asplund's orig-
inal drawing. George Barrows, of the Museum staff, helped collect American photographs, and
Lawrence Perkins sent the pictiucs of Jensen's Columbus Park. I wish to thank all these people

for their kindness, also those who at one time or another read and criticized the manuscript:

Kenneth Kassler, Catherine and William Wurster, Clarinda and John Lincoln, Frederick

Gutheim, Edgar Kaufmann, and the Henry Churchill.

late

Beyond formal expression is the debt to George Rowley and to Frank Lloyd Wright, beloved
teachers both now dead. From George Rowley, connoisseur of Chinese painting and Professor
of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, comes my conviction that man's relation to

nature has a great deal to do with his art; from Frank Lloyd Wright comes my knowledge that

the proposition works also in reverse that art can give man a feeling that he is no stranger to

the earth.
Elizabeth B. Kassler

Princeton, 1964

It is a pleasure to report that the passage of twenty years has diminished neither dear Arthtu
Drexler's editorial perspicacity nor the Museum's tolerance of my rather unconventional view

of landscape design.
Special thanks on this round go to my niece, Sadie Wurster Super, who introduced me to the

1969 book on People's Park and went to great trouble to track down the photographer of the
picture used here, also to Celia .Scott Maxwell, who turned my attention to the Pare de la \'il-

lette competition and the late work of Carlo Scarpa.

Finally, I am deeply indebted to Princeton University's Library of Urban and Environmental
Studies for almost fifty years of generous a.ssistance and to the American Landscape Architecture
Foundation for their suggestion to the Museum that a new edition of this book might be timely.
E. B. K.
Princeton, 1984

1964, The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, New York, New York 10019
Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 84-60535
ISBN 0-87070-473-7
Printed in the U.S.A.
Designed by Joseph Bourke Del V'alle

Revised edition, 1984; second printing, 1986

Canada by Thames and Hudson Ltd., London
Distributed outside the United States and
FRONT COVER. Luis Barragan: Plaza del Companario, Las Arboledas, State of Mexico, 1960.
BACK COVER. Carlo Scarpa: Brion-Vega Cemetery, San Vito de Altivole, Treviso, Italy, 1970-72.
contents

5 man and nature

7 a frame of reference

The classical tradition:

landscape design as architecture

Eighteenth-century England and the
genius loci
Influence from China and Japan
The Moslem contribution
Pressures o our own time

17 the outdoor room

29 parks and plazas

45 the view from above

51 gardens and flower gardens

67 gardens in a natural landscape

73 constructed landscapes

80 buildings and the land

94 since 1964

111 index
Gardens of Vaux-le-Vicomte, de-
signed 1656-61 by Andr^ Le Notre,
from a seventeenth-century engrav-

ing by Perelle.
Nature played a subordinate, al-

most extraneous part.

Gardens of the Katsura Imperial

Villa, Kyoto, Japan, c. 1636.

An unsentimental effort to pene-

trate to the essence of nature.
 We are surroxmded with things which we have
not made and xuhich have a life and structure
different from our own: trees, flowers, grasses,

rivers, hills, clouds. For centuries they have in-

spired ns with curiosity and awe. They have been

objects of delight. We have recreated them in our
imaginations to reflect our moods. And rue have
come to think of them as contributing to an idea
which we have called nature.
Kenneth Clark, 1949

man and nature

When men have had a strong shared sense of their phice in the universe, their
gardens too have tended to be strong and sure, tor the making of a garden is always
something of an act of faith. If people of different times and places have had very
different ideas of the way a garden should be organized, it is largely because they
have made very different assumptions, strongly affecting their esthetic preferences,
as to the relationship between man and nature.
Consider the Villa Lante and the Villa d'Este, Vaux-le-Vicomte and Versailles.
Would these masterpieces of Renaissance and Baroque Europe have been possible
had man not felt himself separate from and superior to the natural order? Nature
played a subordinate, almost extraneous part in these gardens of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, for rational man, divorced from his biological context,
acted in his Biblical role as lord of creation. Imposing his magnificent mathe-
maticsupon land and plants alike, he ordered the garden around his own tri-

umphant progress down a straight central axis an axis given special authority by
its symmetrically balanced sides, and forced recalcitrant greenery into Euclid's
ideal shapes. As formally geometric and architectural as the building of which it

was the logical extension, the garden was man's triumph over nature. More than
any other art form, it was direct expression of man's faith in himself as center of
the universe.
The Chinese and no divine assurance of dominion over
the Japanese were given
the earth. For them man was part of universal nature, and no more particularly
fashioned after the likeness of God than are the fish of the sea and the fowl of the
air; no more than trees, flowers, grasses, rivers, hills, clouds; no more than rocks.
Considering a garden, like a painted landscape, as an attempt to capture "the life-

movement of the spirit through the rhythm of things," they sought to create a
place where man would feel in harmony with cosmic forces, a place where the
sense of otherness would give way to the sense of oneness. Design was not based on
the abstractions of geometry, but on the artist's perception of the life-rhythms of
nature and the inner relatedness of one thing to another mountain to water,
solid to void, active to passive. The garden was not organized along static
man-

centered axes, but with the same moving focus that brings the observer into a Chi-
nese landscape painting as an active participant. Rather than an imposition of
order from without, it was an unsentimental effort to penetrate to the essence of

nature.
Today the certainties of the Renaissance and the certainties of the Far East seem

equally remote. We share only our uncertainties. Progenitor and product of the

industrial and scientific revolutions, modern man seems to feel neither above "na-

ture" nor part of it, merely alien. To judge from contemporary writing and paint-
ing, we seem not too sure, inside, that it is anything more than an agglomeration

of arbitrary fragments of experience. Cast in our own image is the cruel and
meaningless dreariness of the man-altered environment, this creeping wasteland
in which we have our being.
We are out of joint with nature, and out of joint with our own natures as a con-

sequence. If this is the way it must be, then art and nature are best kept separate

from each other. Scrupulous separation, even a wilfully shocking expression of dis-

jointedness, would seem to be more real (and better art) than the application of ex-

traneous harmonies to indilferent nature in a pious attempt to persuade ourselves

that, though we are strangers to this earth, we are at least In Charge.

If, on the other hand, visible nature is not hopelessly and absurdly irrelevant to

the human condition, if there is still a chance for us to find ourselves within a

whole, perhaps landscape art can help us to a sense of meaningful relationship.

A Western artist who feels that earth and trees and water do have possible rele-

vance to man must create that relevance himself. Unlike a Chinese or Japanese,

he works out of no common background of understanding, and has no familiar

symbols to help him; yet it is possible, possible that he will in his own way make
the nature of nature accessible to our awareness and to our sense of lively

participation.

Outdoor room with fountain, from

a seventeenth-century engraving by
Venturini.
Planting can offer a spatial experi-
ence.
a frame of reference

Since the landscape designer's materials often come to hand already fashioned
as objects of delight either through their own life or through the impact of nat-

ural forces his art may lie partly in omission: the ground may be spared the
bulldozer, the stream flow free of channel or culvert, the woods avoid the chain-
saw, and the shrub escape the clippers; but in so far as he is an artist, not merely

a conservationist, he will one way or another shape his materials into fresh con-
tent. If only through addition or subtraction he will recreate nature.
The way in which he approaches the landscape today is affected, consciously

or unconsciously, by many factors some out of the present, others out of the
past. Although a few contemporary designers deny all connection with history,
to the lay observer similarities seem not always coincidental, and tradition not
invariably dead.

The classical tradition: landscape design as architecture

The old gardens of China and Japan were the work of poets, painters, philoso-
phers, but in our part of the world landscape art has generally been considered a

form of architecture. In ancient Rome, in the Renaissance, and again in the late

nineteenth and the twentieth centuries it has been men of architectural inclina-
tion, if not always with specific architectural training, who have dominated the

art; and in the United States, ever since the curriculum was introduced late in

the nineteenth century, the professional designer is almost invariably a graduate

"landscape architect," or an architect who feels that buildings and settings are
one problem rather than two.
Association of the two arts makes a great deal of sense. Both are environmental
arts, concerned with the impact of man upon his surroundings and with the im-
pact of his surroundings upon man, and seeking their ends through the integra-

tion of use with beauty. Both serve man's convenience and comfort, whether
indoors or out, therefore share certain fundamental techniques of planning and
construction; and both serve man's pleasure by providing a continuous experi-

ence of changing relationships, synchronous with his own body's movement in

space and time. Both professions look beyond the individual building, the indi-
vidual garden, to the great problems of urban design and regional development,
for theirs are social arts, affecting the lives of all manner of people by bringing

them into new and potentially fruitful relationships with each other and with
the world about them.
Since architecture implies a rational ordering of plan and construction, gardens
laid out with T-square, triangle, and compass, are generally called architectural.

Nevertheless, as Laotse intimated long ago, the reality of architecture lies neither
in its materials nor in its geometry, but in its space; and only a garden that offers

a vivid experience of space in its three full dimensions is in this sense of the word
architectural. Whether forms be geometric or free is unimportant. What does

matter is the presence or absence of a suggestion of bodily containment.

As every amateur of cities knows, space can be shaped outdoors as well as in,

and the open areas between buildings are on occasion more positive than the
buildings themselves. (Few people would exchange St. Mark's Square in Venice
for any of the buildings that define it.) When height and breadth
and depth all

work together, planting can offer a spatial experience without help from man-
made walls and ceiling. Canopies of branches can suggest scale and shelter even
as their high shifting patterns evoke a relationship with the sky. Supporting trunks
are structural columns, while shrubs and low-branching trees, whether left in

their natural exuberance or clipped into flat textured planes, become defining

walls of any desired height. Planting lends itself to almost any kind of
spatial

elaboration, any subtlety of perspective, any degree of formality, any decorative

effect. Beneath is the giound, itself a plastic element that can be raised or low-

ered, tilted or leveled, terraced or contoured, to mold a flow of space. As flat

sheets or serried jets, water too can define space and, through reflection
or pene-

tration, relate to the sky. As though that weren't enough, it offers itself as ani-

mated ornament.
There is a point, however, at which the easy parallel between the two arts be-

comes inadequate. Can lumber really be equated with a living tree? Is there not

a profound difference in kind between the docile materials stacked in a building-

supply yard and the irregular, unabstracted, intractable, yet lawful materials of
animate nature? Is the ground, the surface of the earth, a passive medium with-

out possible claims of its own? And water, protean water, can it be classed with

any finality as an architectural material? The identification of outdoor space

with architectural space is also a half-truth, for the sky is not a blue vault but an

endless void.
Over-insistence on landscape art as planning and building and space creation
can have unfortunate consequences, aggravated in this day of "personality cult"
architecture. It promotes irrelevant geometry, and easily turns formality into

formalism. It encourages the designer to assert himself where he might wisely be

quiet and fosters, among those of lesser talent, a busy kind of showmanship that is

distasteful in buildings and repellent when applied to the vast impersonal truths

of nature. Worst of all, it discourages the designer from approaching his natural

materials with the deep perception that can come only from profound under-
standing together with a certain degree of humility.
Because of the extraordinary character of these special materials, landscape
art has a possibility that lies beyond architecture. It can offer an experience of

architecture. It can also offer, with or without the assistance of architecture, an

experience of universal nature.

 genius loci
Eighteenth-century England and the

the ambig-
tradition is two-told. If we inherit
Perhaps lort.mately. the Western
d.rect
landscape art as architecture, we
are also
uous Renaissance concept of
invented by
anti-architectural "landscape style"
heirs to the non-geometric,
adapted from
for their rural seats. Whether
eighteenth-century English gentlemen
or the Dutch, the formal garden
had never rested easily
the Italians, the French,
had authoritartan bias
of England, nor its
on the open, undulating countryside
sfr from th,s
suited the national psyche. It was inevitable that the English should
to
considering their strong attachnrent
Procrustean bed and not astounding,
contr.bufons
land, that in so doing tlrey
should make one of their few great
their

to the visual arts. .

and well before the articulate sens-

to the next,
Almost from one generation
nature. They found ,t hab.ta
bilities of Romantic poetry, the English discovered
extended even mountain and forest, deser
to wilderness:
ble Their taste for it
sublmre. .Sud-
avoided, were now relished as
and ocean, previously feared and
wall and terrace, fountam, top.-
denly impatient with the rationalized artifice of
ancestral gardens wtth
avenue, they redesigned their
ary. quincunx, and clipped
as model, particularly
the gently ideal-
seventeenth-centtny landscape painting

Claude Lorrain (1600-1682): Land-

scape with a Piping Shepherd.

Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire. Pal-

ace (1705) and Palladian bridge
Re-
(1720) by Sir John Vanbrugh.
modeled park and artificial pond
by Lancelot (Capability) Brown in
early 1760s.
Art was evident . . . only in the per-

fect beauty of the scenery.

 Prior Park, near Bath. Grounds
and Palladia n bridge possibly de-

signed by Capability Brown in

early 1760s.
Rough-cropped undulating mead-
Oli'S.

ized country scenes of Claude, and brought rough-cropped undulating meadows

up to the very windows of their elegant mansions. The newly naturalized "land-

scape gardens," perhaps better called parks, were composed with a painter's eye
for asymmetrical balance in depth, unity of character, harmony of color, and Grounds of Scotney Castle, Kent,

effects of light and shade; yet art was evident theoretically, at least only in
designed c. 1837. The picturesque
approach to landscape gardening,
the perfect beauty of the scenery. The designer would often be the owner him-
wilder and rougher than Brown's
self; or he might be a painter (William Kent), or a professional gardener (Capa- style.

bility Brown), or a "country gentleman" (Humphrey Repton). Rarely would he Consummate artistry, artjuUy con-

be an architect. No matter what the professions, or lack of profession, of the de- cealed.

signers, the beauty of the English covmtryside today is largely due to the consum-
mate artistry, artfully concealed, with which they worked.
The landscape style is less a style than a live tradition. Popularized in the

United States by Andrew Jackson Downing in the 1840s, it has been responsible
for large metropolitan parks all over the world ever since Calvert Vaux and the
great Frederick Law Olmsted designed New York's Central Park in 1858; and

from Downing through Skidmore, Owings & Merrill it has been welcomed as a
flexible basis for design wherever grounds are spacious and use not prohibitively
intensive. Less specifically, it is the ancestor of the continuous tree-studded lawn

that lines our pleasantest suburban streets, and provides the indispensable tapis

vert upon which Le Corbusier poses the huge apartment slabs of his proposed
cities.

Yet the idea of designing a landscape as a seventeenth-century painter might

have composed it on his canvas has limited vitality today. If we are painters, we
are twentieth-century painters, and anyway the comparison presumes a static

10
 quality in nature and in our relations with our environment that is foreign to our
J "J.
I'' ^ feeling in the matter. We feel uneasy, too, with the generalizing, idealizing func-
tion of the landscape style, and find a hint of the Dresden shepherdess in Capa-
bility Brown's idyllic pastures.

The present importance of the style, then, lies less in the timeless serenity of its

typical compositions than in an invigorating principle that stands behind them,

j.^5-

yet transcends them. It was Alexander Pope who in 1731 urged garden designers to

Consult the Genius of the Place in all;

That tells the Waters or to rise, or fall;

Or helps th'ambitious Hill the heavens to scale,

Or scoops in circling theatres the Vale;

Calls in the Country, catches op'ning glades,

Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades;

Now breaks, or now directs, th'intending Lines;

f^ Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.

w St'fraHIr
^ ^w^ iM
.^tm
f
n
Pope's own genius lay in his original interpretation of genius loci, which had re-
fM^m '.?

i P^^ '"^B
Kp.-^ ferred to the minor mythical deity presiding at any particular location. In its new
|r L*^--
/.
"*^ k^ meaning as the individual character of a site and the artist's primary source of
> S^IBP*
""i'
"w^V^^
inspiration was implied a new or newly conscious attitude toward design.

j
"Consult the genius of the place in all." The principle is as pertinent to the
,. ^
problems of the twentieth century as it was two hundred years ago to the re-
Attributed to Ma Lin, Sung dy-
nasty. modeling of a great landed estate. It requires neither lush, unspoiled country as

Chinese painters found the essence start nor naturalistic design as means. Even a formal garden, even an urban
of a tree in its rhythmic structure. plaza, even a building or an entire city can be informed by the spirit of its place.

It can belong.

Influence from China and Japan

Respect for the natural beauty of plants we inherit from the English, but for
the particular way in which we see them today we are more indebted to the Far
East to Chinese landscape painting as well as to Japanese gardens.
Western painters have liked to paint trees in the enveloping growth of high
summer, when form becomes light-dappled mass, but Chinese painters found the
essence of a tree in its rhythmic structure. Here they saw Tao, the Way of the
Universe and "mother of all things under heaven." They delighted in the subtle
life-movement of bamboo and the sinewed force of gnarled pines, and they painted
the flowering plum in earliest spring, before leaves came to blur the jagged con-
tinuity of its bones. Japanese gardeners, in the work we most value, took a similar
approach, choosing plants more for individuality of structure than for flowers or
foliage, then pruning and training to intensify inherent rhythm.

1]
 Sand garden, Ryoanji Temple, near
Kyoto, 1499.
A marvelous liveliness in the in-

teractions of these very positive

shapes.

Admiration for Oriental art has sharpened our awareness of plants as animate

sculpture shaped by the interaction of growth and environment. Rocks too we

can now see as sculpture, whether the single monumental stone or the artfully
natural group, and through the influence of Japan we become newly alert to

texture of leaves, of rocks, of ground surfaces.

We like Japanese gardens. We like the economy of means that intensifies the

life of each plant, the character of each rock, and we find a marvelous liveliness

in the interactions of these very positive shapes. We like that preference for subtle

suggestion over bald statement which makes the tenth contemplation of Ryoanji
more profoundly satisfactory than the first. Sometimes, it is true, we see trees and

shrubs as brutally deformed as they ever were by European geometry; occasion-

ally the gardens seem to us contrived and precious; often they seem spatially in-
conclusive; yet they are by and large so much to our taste that there is a strong

temptation to copy. For us, however, a landscape is not "mountain-water" as it

has been to the Chinese and the Japanese. For us there has been neither Yang
nor Yin, and no Tao to illuminate trees and rocks and grasses with spirit. Let us
take, gratefully, only what we can make our own.

The Moslem contribution

From another exotic tradition, the Moslem, we are learning to develop new

sensibilities and pursue new possibilities. Here the stimulus is simple and single:

water, shaped for use and pleasure at many levels of experience.

This was living sounding water, frothing down carved chutes, leaping into
jets, brimming over placid reflecting pools, and flowing
through precisely cut

stone channels to irrigate the garden and to connect one part with another,
in-
A carved marble chute as source of
than,
doors with outdoors. Emphasis was always upon the water itself rather as water in a seventeenth-century Mos-

in Europe, upon elaborate stonework and statuary; yet treatment was never nat- lem garden at Aurangabad, India.

12
 Persian summer pavilion with pool
and channel, from an engraving in
Flandin and Coste, Voyage en Perse,
1841.
Emphasis luas ohvays upon the

ivater itself.

uralistic, for everything was shaped to reflect man's joy that water had been

made available to the garden through his own ingenious intercession.

The same waterworks that brought life to the plants, structure and animation

to the garden, and varied delight to the ear, were planned to mitigate the dis-

comforts of a hot, dry climate. If we now talk of building in relation to climate,

we enter a field in which the Moslem long ago proved himself expert.

Pressures of our own time

Against this background of inheritance and appropriation, pressures from

within his own age affect the way in which today's landscape designer under-
stands his art.
One way or another he is affected by the sweep of social change. Rich private

clients give way to municipalities, park commissions, highway authorities, insti-

tutions, business enterprises, occasional small householders,

and a stimulating

new set of problems; the passing of the old-fashioned gardener brings a demand
for easy maintenance through preservation of wild growth,
reduction and sunpli-

fication of lawn areas, avoidance of clipped hedges, limitation of flower beds;

and the massive new interest in outdoor activity, encouraged by increased leisme,

is a growing challenge.
The new age has brought no important new materials to the landscape artist.

His basic mediums are still earth, water, masonry, and green growing things. It

does, however, offer new techniques to facilitate earth-moving, whether for view,

privacy, convenience, or simply for the beauty of the

sculptured shapes. Some-
tunnels, or base-
times the earth comes free as waste from depressed expressways,

13
 Contour strip cropping and terrac-

ing on an irrigated farm in Texas.

An experience . . . extracted from
natural land form.

ment excavations. A bulldozer can devastate a landscape; on the other hand, it

can or rather, might be used to offer an experience as intensely extracted

from natural land form as the field-terraced mountains in certain parts of South-

east Asia or the contour-plowed fields of our own countryside.

A by-product of modern industrial society is the eagerness to escape from mech-
anized, regimented living. More than ever man relishes the feel of earth under
his feet. More than ever he delights in spontaneity and freedom and wildness and
irrationality, and where can he better look for this than to the landscape? The
need is not wholly satisfied by holiday excursions. It makes demands on daily
surroundings and even affects formal landscape architecture. The Grand Man-
ner of Le Notre becomes foreign to us, and we are wary of axial symmetry even
at the man-scale of Italian humanism. OiUside, as inside, we prefer a freer, less
presumptuous shaping, and favor an organization by which design elements are
so dynamically interrelated that the separate identity of each one is enhanced,
voids become positive forces, and man himself enters the composition more ac-

tively than in the classical tradition of bilateral or central symmetry. Independ-

ent, in this case, of important influence from the Orient, we nevertheless begin to

approximate the Oriental insistence upon relatedness, rh)thmic sequence, and

the equilibrium of strong tensions. We do this in our own way, retaining much
of oiu' innate interest in direction, progress, climax.

When the element of formal design is a living plant, the preservation and en-

hancement of its separate identity is something of a problem. Geometrically

clipped hedges, for instance, are as handsome as ever, and as useful in defining
space. Some are illustrated in these pages. Yet hedges begin to look as quaint as

topiary, simply because the imposition of geometry upon natural growth denies
the plant its freedom and individuality. The future seems to belong to the artist

who neither nullifies nor changes the character of his plant materials, but rather
reveals their innermost idea. Often that idea is better expressed by groups or

14
masses of like plants than by the single specimen or the motley assortment. Just
as "a crowd, a host of golden daffodils" conveys the essence of daliodilness, so a
grove of birch or beech or hemlock may provide a more intense experience than
the single tree. Massing some varieties and using others as strong individuals, the

designer can make such active relationships between his plants that their unique-

ness is accentuated.
It becomes apparent that the architecture of the landscape, perhaps even more
than the architecture of buildings, can be wholly ours yet wholly free only
when structure and space are developed, in Frank Lloyd Wright's phrase, "out
of the nature of materials." We demand a close relationship between indoors and

outdoors, but wish the landscape to be itself, not an architectural appendage.

If a landscape is to be or become itself, it must be understood through every

interpretive instrument. It must be understood through the ancient intuitions of
sight and smell, touch and hearing, and through that sense by which we feel a
place not as a static fact, but as a phenomenon joining past to future, time to

eternity;through the shiny new tools of science; and through the bird's-eye view
of flight flying has changed the way we see and feel. Even with
our feet firmly

on the ground, awareness of the down-view expands head-on evidence. Just as

we know that scale and position are relative and multiple, so we know from
flight and from high-speed surface travel that the earth is endlessly round, and

that a hillside in Connecticut is no limited parcel of land, but part of the vast

continuum of the earth's surface an habitat uneasily shared by man and nature,
at present to the detriment of both.
As it becomes obvious that we have applied ourselves with more whim than
problem of how best to live upon this earth, or rather, with
wisdom to the critical

this earth, we begin to realize that the work of fitting people to the land, and fit-

ting the land to people, must be undertaken with much the same care for action

and interaction that a forester might apply to his far simpler problems of ecology.

And measure of beauty seems the happy by-product of any ecologically

since a
will be
sound approach to land use, it is unlikely that our physical environment
ugly if it is planned to respect both the nature of man and the
nature of nature.
an art than as a science? Isn't
Should less be demanded of landscape design as

it possible that a garden or plaza or park or boulevard must finally be judged as

an essay in the tenancy of the earth? If it is to pass such a test (and some of the

work shown in this book would gracefully fail), it must look and feel ecologically

must appear to be of its place, not on its place, and its natural materials
valid. It

must seem to belong together with a more than formal relationship.

makes his own truth. Like his brothers back through
Out of all this the artist
according to his
history to the mythical Garden, he will recreate the landscape

own subjective image of reality. As he takes hold of earth, plants, and water, the
materials unique to his art, let him only beware lest he destroy through his act

of possession the genius of that which he has sought to possess.

15
 the outdoor room
Introverted, secluded, contained against the wilderness, the outdoor room is

the archetypal garden. Even when gardens could safely embrace the far horizon,

the amenities of enclosure were never entirely forgotten.

To be felt as a roofless room, a walled garden must be limited in area. The
prototype is the inner court the garden within the house rather than the house

within the garden. The concept is traditional in Spanish America, but only in

the last decade important in contemporary architectine. Our national distrust of

property-line walls as undemocratic contributes to the present popularity of cotxrt
houses, for the open-air privacy that cannot politely be provided outside the
house is provided within. Some day a private outdoor room will be considered
as indispensable to a dwelling as a bathroom.

As the courtyard principle is extended to row houses and apartments, schools

and office buildings, architecture tmns in upon itself with a new sense of space.
Since the natural landscape, though held in memory, may be unseen or barely
glimpsed, the design of an outdoor room is remarkably free. Often it is furnished
to contrast with the outer world: in a desert, it may be a jungle, but in a jungle
it may be an oasis of austerity. Design wall often be geometric, for within walls a
geometric lavout can seem as appropriate as it can seem inappropriate in open
country. If surrounding walls are glass, the sense of enclosure dwindles. If they
are patterned with doors and windows and sunshades, planting quickly looks
fussy and quiet pools multiply the busy facades into dizziness. It is beautiful

blank walls that best contain a garden comt.

Rather than centering or adjoining a building, the closed garden can stand
free in the landscape. The garden of a medieval castle was often a detached

retreat, and Washington's visits to his high-walled flower and kitchen gardens
at Mount Vernon also required a purposefid effort. Louis XIV and his courtiers

walked far to reach salons and theaters carved out of the Versailles greenery.

Isn't difficulty of attainment often conducive to increased enjoyment?

The reality of an outdoor room is finally the sky. No one has understood this

better than Le Corbusier. Even when his roof gardens are entirely unplanted, as

is often the case, they offer an intense experience of nature through their power-
ful relationship to sky and sun.

Bernard Rudofsky: Arnstein house, Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1941.

Indoor and outdoor rooms are enclosed by the same

high wall, an austere background for free and luxuriant
planting. Glimpsed beyond the orchid-hung trellis of the
living-room court is the courtyard that adjoins the master
bedroom, and the far door enters a third garden.

17
 Erik Glemme, Stockholm Park Department: Sitting area,
Vasa Park, Stockholm.
Within a sizable mid-city park, this garden was con-
ceived as a retreat for older people. Above the low wall
and continuous with its inner shell, an open concrete frame-
work suggests enclosure even as it breaks up an intrinsically
dubious view into more attractive segments. As in other
Stockholm parks, seating arrangements are poorly related
to the design.

Chief source of delight is the intricate pavement of pale

gray stone slabs and dark gray cobbles set in concrete.
Patterned of squares and oblongs, and put together with
considerable freedom, it is less mechanical than the strict

modular grid that is presently fashionable. Dwarf rhodo-

dendrons fill one of the raised planting boxes. Others are
massed with flowers, changed with the seasons. One square
frame is set below the pavement to contain a shallow pool
and a thin jet of water.

pr:._
"^
m
f
L
ik
^Q
_;..^^ftPi:
ii
Le Corbusier: Villa Savoye, Poissy-
sur-Seine, France, 1930.
Enclosing the second-floor ter-

siu; race is a prototype of the Vasa Park

space-defining framework.

18
the outdoor room
 Skidmore, Owings &: Merrill: Reynolds Metals Company,
Richmond, Virginia, 1958.
Based on the distance between supporting columns, the
module of the courtyard floor relates outdoor space as

closely to structure as indoor space. Some squares are set

with red brick, some with grass, one with water. Dense
masses of magnolia and holly appear to advantage against
the patterned walls.

Skidmore, Owings &: Merrill, architects; Sasaki, Walker &:

Associates, landscape consultants: The Upjohn Company,

Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1961.
Of the nine inner courtyards that puncture the vast
square building (see page 74), the entrance court illus-

trated at lower left is the largest and deepest. There are

three distinct floor planes: the peripheral walk of gray
granite, the lowered white marble paving of the garden
area, and the great sheet of water that appears to flow
from beneath the marble.
Shown directly below is one of the smaller courts. The
vocabulary is similar, but broad architectural lines give
way to smaller elements and an Oriental use of rocks and
low evergreens.

20
 Sutemi Horiguchi: Okada house and garden, Tokyo, 1933.
Designed by a student of Walter Gropius who became a pioneer of
modern architecture in Japan, the garden is his personal synthesis of

contemporary German ideas and the native classical tradition of the

early Edo period.

Walls, terraces, and pool are an interplay of flat rectangular planes.
Sharply defined against these noncommittal surfaces are isolated shapes
of organic and inorganic nature, their separate identities strengthened

by the tensions between them. Voids are as important as solids.

the outdoor room

 Le Corbusier: Penthouse for Charles de Beistegui, Paris, 1931.

The experience was sky and sun rather than white walls and green
grass carpet. The juxtaposition of fireplace and Arc de Triomphe was
a witticism that served, in a way, to relate this now demolished roof
garden to its locale.

Le Corbusier: Villa Savoye, Poissy-sur-Seine, France, 1930.

Even in the country Le Corbusier will often hoist outdoor living to

the rooftops, for a garden or terrace at ground level blurs the rigor-
ously clean distinction between man-made and natural forms that is

basic to his art. The toit jardin, he feels, reclaims for use the outdoor
area lost to construction and removes people from traffic and noise.

Divorced from the ground, his architecture often marries the sky.
Even in his boxy buildings there are often powerful shapes that erupt
through the roof and jab up into the void as though the forces behind
them were too strong for polite containment. Sometimes these shapes
suggest outdoor rooms.

22
 Le Corbusier: Apartment house at Marseilles, France, 1952.
As the elemental power of Le Corbusier's architecture increases in
later work, magnificent tensions are set up between buildings and
distant horizon.
The relationship between the rugged mountains and the bold shapes
of this rooftop playground is no accident. The mountains are ab-
stracted in the inclined wall planes, and their actuality is brought
into the composition by the changing perspectives of recessive col-

umns that define foreground, middle ground, and distance.

the outdoor room 23

 Fountain

Runnel

Pool

Lawrence Halprin: Mclntyre garden, Hillsborough, California, 1961.

A series of outdoor rooms set into a California hillside, this Moslem
water garden is almost as successfully naturalized as the Australian

eucalypti that tower above it.

Emphasis is entirely upon the many faces, the many voices of water

as erupts in jets thick and thin, tumbles into basins, ripples through
it

precisely cut stone channels, cascades down steps, burbles against

interference, and comes to rest in a quiet pool.

The retaining wall steps down to affirm the slope of the land, avoid-

ing awkwardness by changing direction at each change of level. More

important than the walls is the floor, especially the insistent line of the

smooth concrete edgings, reiterated in the broad horizontals of the

stairs.

24
the outdoor room 25
 Edward D. Stone: United States Embassy, New Delhi, India, 1958.
Offices open from a central water garden dappled with shadow by the gold-colored

aluminum sunscreen that shelters it. Islands and stepping stones are asymmetrically
disposed, and cantilevered edges make them seem to hover weightlessly over the water.
In the Moslem tradition of northern India, jets are simple and single, issuing from
inconspicuous nozzles.

26
ViH

Philip Johnson: Roofless Church. New Harmony, Indiana, 1960.

Sand's remark that only the sky is a roof vast enough

Its name prompted by George
worshipping humanity, the walled garden is used for non-denominational
to embrace all

Utopian community rich with mementos of Harmonists and Owenites.

services in a
hedge.
The main through gates into a formal vestibule defined by a clipped
entrance is

bronze symbolizing the descent

Beyond, under a powerfully shaped canopy, is a Lipchitz
Symmetrical planting would have been the conventional adjunct
of the Holy Spirit.

to the strong central axis, by the shrine. Instead the architect has made an
dominated
golden
active relationship between the folded, wood-shingled canopy, the sumptuous
myrtle, and red geraniums. Planting beds
rain tree, and low masses of Burford holly,
apparent loss of freedom.
defer to the right angles of the pavement, but without

the outdoor room

 Holger Blom, Stockholm Park Department:
Kungstriidgarden, Stockholm, c. 1955.

A small midtown plaza, originally laid

out in the naturalistic landscape style, has

been remodeled to this more useful and ur-

bane design. Grass and paths were replaced

by pavement inset with rectangular pools,
informally massed flowers, and changing
craft exhibits housed in elegant glass cases.

28
 parks and plazas

Ever since Central Park was laid out in 1858 the landscape style has provided

appropriate answers for large metropolitan parks, where naturalized greenery

has a fair chance to look natural; but fragile grass set with picturesquely grouped

trees is irrelevant to a small, intensively used plaza.

Often it is the ardent nature-lover who is most insistent on drawing a firm line

between town and country. Let country be country, he says, and let town be

town, and let an urban square be urbane for, he might add, urbanity is the
spirit of its place. And he will look for inspiration, if anywhere, to the elegance of

Le Notre's Tuileries Gardens, or to the irregular, unplanted piazzas of medieval

Italy, or to the variously delightful solutions of present-day Stockholm. He may
or may not consider urban open space as architecture; but he will certainly treat

it as landscape, not merely because it uses plant materials, which it may not do
at all, but ])ecause it must make its peace with sun and sky, wind and rain, and
because it belongs to the continuous surface of the earth. Not for him, the ruth-
less leveling of San Francisco's tilted squares for subterranean parking.

Plazas need people for completion. To ensure their free movement, restrictive

paths defer to large areas of pavement, but pavement of such color, texture, and
pattern that it serves as antidote to the asphalt jungle rather than continuation.
Water too plays a major role, for people like to linger by festive waters even when
their duties lie elsewhere. In some climates the legendary association of fire

and water may offer possibilities. As one Victorian remarked, "A large chafing
dish, containing a good fire, would be a far more agreeable ornament in the

center of an English place or square, for at least eight months of the year, than

any fountain."
In both city and suburl) the isolated, neatly bounded park begins to give way
to a continuous system of greenways, dedicated to pedestrians and bicyclists,

that connect dwellings with schools and centers, broaden out here and there as

gardens and playgrounds, and finally emerge into open country as rights of way
through fields and woodland. Walking may again become a pleasure, perhaps

with some attendant mitigation of the traffic problem.

Even at the vast scale of the metropolitan region, the shape of open areas can
important in the visual image as the shape of urban areas. The "Year 2000"
be as

plan for our national capital, providing gieat wedges of open land between
densely developed radial corridors, is an impressive effort in this direction.

Gunnar Asplund: Library Park, Stockholm, 1927-35.

From the right an artfully rustic stream tumbles down through
boulders to the pond. Sculptured figures by Ivar Johnsson mark the
fall of water into the great formal basin.

29
 S.-.j)t
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Flower parterre, Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen.

As many travelers know, mid-city Tivoli offers all manner of delight:
restaurants for every purse and concerts for every taste; zoo, play-
grounds, and amusement park; boating ponds, water spectacles, and
gardens that include the tranquil retreat illustrated here.
Within the free curves of a brick retaining wall (1) and a pond (3),
the rhythmic arrangement of bubbling basins (2) and diagonal brick
walks brings together low, immensely colorful plants and a scattering
of trees.

30
Sven Markelius and Holger Blom: Plaza at Vallingby, Stockholm.
The town square of Vallingby, a satellite of Stockholm, is implanted.
Hospitable to the northern sun and to citizens of every age, it offers

circle-patterned granite paving and raised pools confined by circular

benches.

Typical Stockholm street corner.

Holger Blom, the architect who headed the Stockholm Park Depart-
ment, early in the 1930s designed reinforced concrete flower pots to
group about the city as "portable gardens." Municipalities in other
countries followed the Swedish example, though rarely with such success.

parks and plazas

 Le Corbusier: Park of the capital of the Punjab,
Chandigarh, India. Begun 1952.
The architect's sketch of 1952 shows the center
of the huge park as a giant earth sculpture, with
pools on two levels and massive staircases descend-
ing to simken plazas. At the top of the drawing is

the Governor's Palace, (1) on the photograph of

the model. The Parliament (2) and the Secretariat

(3) are out of view at left, while the Court of Jus-

tice (4) lies off at the right.
Le Corbusier uses artificial hills (5) and serried

trees to obliterate unwanted views, to tie together

the widely separated buildings, and to suggest

scale in the vastness. The free-form mounds, piled
up of earth excavated from the depressed high-
ways and planted with an informal mixture of
trees, play against the powerful geometry of the
architecture; and walls of trees, aiTanged to form
"chambrcs de verdure," will occasionally close the

horizon. Tree-wall and mound are sketched with

the Secretariat at the foot of the page.

"(3)

w^
{mm.

.iiiilfflt

32
#% 'm3 r'^-^^.

V 1'

#. 'i'

.ifir'
LEFT. Luis Barragan: Plaza del Bebedero de los Caballos
(Plaza of the Horse Trough), in the subdivision of Las
Arboledas, State of Mexico, 1958-62.
Barragan gives new meaning to the Mexican tradition
of emphatic walls and strong color.

Towering eucalyptus trees are mirrored, silhouetted, and

shadowed on flat planes of water, wall, and earth. Persians
would have admired the economy of means and the em-
phasis upon water; and they would have claimed as their

own the raised brimful pool with its narrow drip gutter
an ancient Persian device for extending reality into its re-

flected image. The long basin is literally a horse trough, for

the plaza was conceived as a meeting place for riders.

Luis Barragan: Plaza del Campanario, Las

Arboledas, State of Mexico, 1960.
(Illustrated in color on the front cover.)
Behind the sapling palisade is the euca-
lyptus avenue which leads to the Plaza del
Bebedero, shown opposite.
[A visit three years ago to Las Arboledas,
a not easily located residential subdivision
northwest of Mexico City, found these mas-
terworks neglected, vandalized, and doomed
to follow El Pedregal into ruin unless preser-

vation measures are quickly adopted. Since

the public has access to only one other major
Barragan fountain, the 1963-64 Fuente de
Los Clubes, the loss of those at Las Arboledas
would be catastrophic E.B.K., 1984]

Luis Barragan: Public fountain, Pedregal

Gardens, Mexico, D.F., 1949.
Staggered lava walls complement a brim-
ming pool, and water enters from an unex-
pected source.

parks and plazas 33

 Si

\l

Luis Barragan: Plaza de las Fuentes (Plaza of the Fountains) in the subdivision of
Pedregal Gardens, Mexico, D.F., 1951.
Laid up of indigenous purplish-black lava rock, walls play against each other to

define a square pool, guarded by blue-painted iron pickets. The formal architectural
framework emphasizes the dynamism of giant boulders, leaping water, and hoary
eucalypti. The impingement of tree trunks upon pavement (of nature upon reason?),
evidently important in the architect's intention, has something of the threat of pre-
Columbian art.

It was Barragan's masterful use of walls that made this plaza memorable to early

visitors. Now the little plaza seems insignificant, overpowered as it is by the clamor of
surrounding houses, waterworks, and planting.

34
^^'m
^.'V^
 LEFT. Carl Milles: Milles Garden, Lidingo Island, near Stockholm.
Sculpture is brought together with sky and water in this terraced
garden once the private pleasure ground of the sculptor, but now
open to the public. Emphasis here is less on the figures than on the
abstract forest of pedestals that repeats the strong verticals of smoke-
stacks on the far bank.

RIGHT. Roberto Burle Marx: Museum of Modern Art Plaza. Rio de

Janeiro, 1955-61.
Stone walks define rectangular beds of such boldly differentiated
character that the pattern and texture of this sunken garden can be
read not only from the peripheral sidewalk, but from upper floors of
distant office buildings. Planting is kept low to free the view of bay
and mountains, and the mat of feathery, wind-tossed grass accentu-

ates the character of rugged granite blocks and shiny, spiky leaves.

I KFT. Herbert Bayer: The Marble Gar-

den, Aspen Meadows Hotel, Aspen,
Colorado, 1955.
Slabs and blocks of unpolished white
marble, found in an abandoned quarry
near Aspen, were disposed on a thirty-
six-foot-square platform to create inter-
esting spatial relationships enlivened

*^.^ by strong shifting shadows and one tall

jet. Sculpture to walk through, the

garden stands free in an undulating
meadow.

36
^;^p -

tAX
 Parks and pedestrian greenways, east-central Philadelphia, 1947-75.
Starting with the surveyor who in 1683 laid out Washington Square
and Franklin Square for AV'illiam Penn, many different governmental
bodies and many different designers have contributed to the open
green spaces in the historic area around Independence Hall; but credit
for recent achievements goes primarily to Edmund N. Bacon, executive
director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission.
In 1947, shortly after the Architectural Review of London suggested
a similar plan for the bombed area around St. Paul's, Bacon proposed
that the redevelopment of the blighted neighborhood southeast of
Independence Hall spare all salvageable old buildings, and that the
most important historic structures be connected by a continuous sys-

tem of parks and footpaths, many cutting through existing blocks.

I With their intimate scale, constantly changing views, and picturesque
juxtapositions of old and new, such greenways as have been built
seem more lively, and kinder to the prevalent eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century architecture than the Mall, too grand for the do-
mestic scale of Independence Hall, or the National Historical Park,
where fine old buildings, robbed of their neighbors, stand in an isola-

tion rarely intended by their designers.

I-*-! I
6

7
1. Franklin Square, 1683
8 2. 'Washington Square, 1683
3. Independence Hall, 1732-41
4. Independence Mall, 1950-69
5. "Third Block of the Mall," 1963
6. Independence National Historical
Park, 1960
7. Apartment towers, 1964
8. Pedestrian greenway, 1975
9. Delancey Street sitting area, 1961
i

38
Dan Kiley, landscape architect; Harbeson Hough Liv-
ingston & Larson, architects: Third Block of Inde-
pendence Mall (No. 5 on plan), Philadelphia, 1963.

Covering an entire city block at the far end of the

Mall and confined by a low sitting-wall, a raised
brick platform has been tightly organized in a twice-
repeated geometric pattern of radiating fountains
that recalls the five original squares of Penn's Phila-
delphia. Incorporated into the design are geometric
forests of honey locusts, and rows of magnolias set
into rectangular planting beds. Benches too are part
of the pattern. There is little incentive to move about,
as the floor level is constant and any twelfth of the
park tells the entire story.
The three central fountains are splendid. Great
jets leap into the air, splatter down upon a four-part

convex slab of granite, then slide off into a square

shallow basin lined with black glass mosaic.

Wilhelm V. von Moltke, Philadelphia City Planning

Commission: Delancey Street sitting area (No. 9 on
plan), Philadelphia, 1961.
The pedestrian greenway opens up new views as
it twists and turns through the city blocks. Occa-
sionally, as here, it widens to become a tiny neigh-
borhood park.

parks and plazas

 Holger Blom, Stockholm Park Department:
Berzelii Park, Stockholm.

An exuberantly planted pond serves as

moat to separate the public park (on far

bank) from the garden restaurant of an
hotel, but music from the restaurant wafts
free over the water to the park's cafe.

> 1 < 1 ' S fi

?i

p-^'

I
d):

J o
10&

^
40
 Isamu Noguchi and Louis I. Kahn: Proposed Adele Levy
Memorial Playground, Riverside Drive, New York, 1964.

No conventional playground, this is a world a child can

make of what he will, fancy free. His adventure would be
based on stimulating materials: great grass-sheathed mounds
enlivened by water chutes; shallow streams and pools;

flights of steps for climbing, some forming a pyramid, others

LEFT. Ian McHarg: Project for Town Center Park, South
(front left) coming together as an informal amphitheater.
West Washington, D.C., 1962.
Set into and under the grass hillside are indoor playrooms
For a newly redeveloped area of Washington that des-
(rear left).
perately needed intelligible open space, McHarg proposed
Noguchi first proposed an earth-sculptured playground
this urbane park. The spine of the project is a formal tree-
in 1933. This latest scheme, if realized, will be a joyous
lined walkway, enlivened by sitting-niches and square out-
release for children and a major work of civic art.
door rooms, which leads from a playground at the east to
a central water garden, surrounded and contained by a
loggia, then on to a romantic landscape garden at the west.

Parking space is provided at the south.

The focal water garden develops Oriental themes.

Strongly contoured islands, planted with evergreens, would
appear in changing perspective as one walked about the
basin in the partial shelter of the loggia.

parks and plazas

 Zion &: Breen: Grounds of the International Hotel, John F.

Kennedy International Airport, New York, 1961.

Clumps of Lombardy poplar, planted in identical gravel
circles, protect the hotel from sight and sound of the air-

port highway. These are far more formal than Capability

Brown's famous clumps, but in both cases the rhythmic
arrangement of groups of trees gives a feeling of openness,

and of liveliness in depth.

42
 Zion & Breen: Grounds of the American National Exhibi-
tion, Moscow, 1959.

The landscape architects worked with refreshing mod-

esty to encourage free circulation from one part of the
exhibition to another, through an existing stand of larch
trees in Moscow's Sokolniki Park.
Compacted earth covered with a thin layer of yellow

LEFT. Skidmore, Owings &: Merrill, with Hertzka & Knowles, sand provided a walking surface within which free-form
grass islands were used to organize the trees into rhythmic
associated architects: Crown Zellerbach Plaza, San Fran-
cisco, 1959.
groups.

Smooth limestone walks are set into a swirling pave-

ment of black pebbles, and granite retaining walls loom
above banks planted with ivy and wild strawberry. The
shallow limestone steps have broad irregular treads, useful
also as seats.

An overall view of this sunken plaza is shown on page 44.

parks and plazas

the view from above

that the symbolic shape

In Ohio and Wisconsin are prehistoric mounds so vast
of eagle, snake, or panther can be deciphered
only from an airplane. Our own

artists may one day mold and carve for the air view. Meanwhile we take pleasure
and find that distance sometimes lends
in the sculpture of the natural landscape
enchantment even to intrinsically dreary man-scapes.

before us we take the down-view, and as we look out

More than any people
buildings gardens become pure pattern, as remote and insubstan-
from our tall

tial as pebbles glinting in a deep clear pool.

set aside some of their
Thirty or so years ago the builders of Rockefeller Center
permanent public open space that would contribute
legally buildable land as

not only to the amenity of their own tall buildings, but to the pleasure of every-

one in the vicinity. The most distinguished of today's urban office-towers follow

this precedent, occasionally more generous ratio of open space to built-

with a far
plazas are elaborate waterworks
over land. Common denominators of the new
high above. Otherwise
and a strong composition that can be read from offices
related to proprietary skyscrapers
they differ remarkably in the way they are
Some are little more than a broadening of the sidewalk
and to the public streets.
and planting beds. Others are set above or below the
level
to include fountains
a sense of
gain relief from distracting traffic and to give the
visitor
of the street to
with a formality mitigated only by feathery treetops
and elusive
arrival. Some,
building. Others
jets d'eau, extend to the outdoors the architecture of the parent
are oases of freedom within the geometry of the
city.

associated archi-
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with Hertzka & Knowles,
San Francisco, 1959.
tects: Crown Zellerbach Building and
Plaza,

The forms of generous plaza are "free," yet purposefully

this very
geometry of a
and precisely shaped to bring together the disparate
sloping triangular site, a squat circular bank
building (lower right),
building, San
and the high rectangular prism of the twenty-story
Francisco's first glass-walled office tower.
and sunk as much as thirteen feet below bordering
Set into the hill

streets, the plaza is seen primarily from

above. Easy access and possi-
the fan of delightfully irregular stone steps
ble seating are limited to
roof of the bank. As the view on page 42
visible just above the fluted
rewarded by textured, pat-
suggests, those who make the descent are
planted earth banks, and
terned paving, subtly mounded, variously
of earth and pavement)
a pool (at lower left, between countered arcs
fountain.
splattered by the intricate play of a winged bronze

45
 mm

Eywin Langkilde: Courtyard of the Baltica Insurance Com-

pany, Copenhagen.
Designed for spectators in a tall office building as well as
for pedestrian pleasures, the court starts as a composition
of interlocked rectangles of grass, water, and granite pav-
ing, then seems deliberately thrown off by lopped corners,
skewed sculpture, and irregularities of the pool coping.

46
LEFT. Sven Hansen: Gardens of a hospital near Copenhagen.
The gardens are boldly drawn for view from the hospi-
tal that rises high above. The main promenade steps across
a rectangular pool and curves down through a fan of
stepped terraces. Like the pool, the terraces are strangely
elongated and empty an effect accentuated by the elab-
oration of detail at their far ends, where lienchcs face low
plants and tiny runnels. Then the walkway enters a par-

terre of lawn (far left) set with bright square flower boxes C. Th. Sorensen: Church Plaza, Kalundborg, Denmark,
and granite paving blocks. Shapes again seem intention- 1952.

ally dislocated. Low mottled hedges make diagonals of interlocking

squares, separated by zigzag grass paths. The extraordi-
nary formality was perhaps evoked by the importance of
the old church that overshadows the plaza.
The landscape architect is also, surprisingly, inventor
of that least formal kind of urban play place, the skram-
mellegeplads ("junk playground," "adventure playground,"
or "Robinson Crusoe playground"), which he proposed in
1931 and first executed in 1941 in Copenhagen.

the view from above

 Roljeno Burle Marx: Roof garden and parterre. Nfin-

i$tr>' of Kduc;*iion. Rio de Janeiro. Brazil. 1945.

The famous Minisin was designed by a group of
Brazilian architects, with Le Corbusier as consultant.

The main building is a fourieen-sior> slab raised high

on columns. Under it and at a right angle is this

low wing, roofed with a garden accesisible from the

Minister's suite and visible from the offices abo>e. Roberto Burle Nfarx: Garden of the Hospital da
The free forms and massed native plants of the roof Lagoa. Rio de Janeiro. Bra/iL 1957.
garden are re|>eated in ground-level planting. As one looks do-n from the tall hospital build-

"The Minister's garden> seen from above." wrote ing, garden and outdoor sitting room become an
Burle Marx, "is as defined as an abstract painting abstraction. Elements are sharply differentiated,
on my drawing l>oard; yet when you actually vk-alk and interdependent in relationships fraught with

io it the raised foliage beds and the groups of bird> strong unresol\"ed tensions.
of-paradise flowers are \*olumes in movement." Foil to the arc of blue-tiled wall is the blood-red
foliage of massed Ireuttf herbstis Hook., a tropical/
temperate member of the amaranth family.

48
F==^

MfO^-i

Isamu Noguchi, designer; Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, architects:

Sunken court in the plaza of the Chase Manhattan Bank Building,
New York, 1964.
The plaza is set over a basement extension of the bank's skyscraper,
a few feet above the turbulent streets of Lower Manhattan. A hole
punched into its terrazzo pavement lights basement corridors and makes
a sunken court. Here Noguchi has shaped a mountain-water landscape.
Hollowed though by erosion and paved in circles broken by long
as

wavy grooves, the granite floor recalls the raked sand of Ryoanji (page
12) in that it suggests water even when water is
absent. Set into the

mounds are choice rocks from Japan.

49
 Luis Barragan: Garden originally owned by the architect, Pedregal
Gardens, Mexico, D.F., 1951.
The encroachment of lava and wild vegetation upon concrete po-
dium and white-painted iron fence suggests complex, ambivalent rela-
tionships between man and nature. Artifact and natural fact are
separate, antagonistic, yet made mutually dependent by the tensions
between them.

50
gardens and flower gardens

A sliared characteristic of modern gardens is openness to view and access from

adjacent buildings, provided tfiat those buildings too are "modern" in design;

and when walls are glass an adjoining garden must be convincing even when
deciduous trees have lost their leaves and herbaceous plants have bowed to frost.

Otherwise they differ remarkably. Some offer the ancient pleasures of digging,
planting, smelling, sitting, strolling. Some provide for playing, swimming, all

manner of activity. Others serve mainly for the enjoyment of sculpture or water,
or for a view from above. Beyond such functional differences is the question,

often debatable, as to whether nature is used for an experience of art, or art for

an experience of nature.
Flowers as such are not indispensable to a garden, and formal beds are today
generally restricted, as in China, to courtyards or terraces of buildings. The idea

of a garden as above all a place to grow flowers is something of a nineteenth-

century invention: fascinated by horticulture, the Victorians crowded their

lawns with showy exotics bedded out in whimsical patterns. Reaction started in
the 1860s when William Robinson urged the use of hardy plants that would har-

monize with the English landscape, and showed how flowers could be natural-
ized in meadow and woodland. Gertrude Jekyll pursued similar ideas, but with

a new feeling for eloquent relationships of forms, colors, and textures, evident

both in her famous borders and in her less formal planting. If we now think of a

garden as continuous in space rather than as Miss Jekyll's isolated "living pic-

tures," her contribution is still impressive.

The day of the red geranium is not over. Turning up, fashionably, in the most
alien circumstances, it is presumably treasured for the shock of unrelatedness as

well as the shock of color. Many sensitive designers, however, are wary of obvi-
ous exotics. They prefer native plants, or such imported plants as have a natural

affinity with the site and with each other. Interested in structure and foliage,

they may reveal extraordinary beauty in ordinary weeds and field grasses. They
avoid heterogeneous assortments, and often dramatize the differences between
plants by playing one kind and color of massed vegetation against another.
If the dynamic interplay of massed plants quickly identifies a garden as be-

longing to our own day, it is only one approach. Since Burle Marx has dealt most

variously with massed plants, it must be noted that this Brazilian plantsman,

master of swirling carpets and geometric patchwork, now sometimes chooses to

explore interrelationships of plants and land (page 63) of an order more subtle
than could be suggested by any formal counterplay of masses. And Barragan's

idea of a garden is something different again.

51
 ABOVE. Lawrence Halprin: Roof garden, San Fran-
cisco, 1952.

A contrapuntal relationship has been established

between the formal modular framework, implied
even when omitted, and the rhythmic disposition of
plants and rocks. The selection of rocks and gravel
shows a fine sense of local scale.

Gabriel Guevrekian: Garden for the Comte de

Noailles, Hyeres, France, 1925.
The square concrete frames are identical in size.

Some are filled with massed tulips, others set flush

with colored tile. Unusual in more recent gardens
of this kind is the central axis, focusing attention on
the sculpture by Lipchitz.

52
 ABOVE. Roberto Burle Marx: Terrace for Inocente
Palacios, overlooking Caracas, Venezuela, 1957.

Two kinds of grass checker the terrace with squares

of light green and dark in a pattern related to the

pavement of the platform. Other vegetation takes

its own bold forms.

Alexander Girard: Patio of his own house, Santa F^,

New Mexico, 1954.
A famous exhibition designer, Girard drew his

materials from New Mexico's living desert and juxta-

posed them to dramatize their unique qualities. Set
below a loggia, the modular composition is seen pri-

M;*^ marily from above.

gardens and flower gardens

Dan Kiley, landscape architect; Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, archi-

tects: Air Garden, U.S. Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colo-
rado, 1959.
The water garden is seven hundred feet long, running from the
cadet dormitories to the dining hall shown below. It lies in a part of
the Academy that is open to the public only on pre-arranged tours.
Since the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains are very dry, but
cool, this oasis offers pools, and full sunlight. Yet water
fountains,
plays a secondary role, for the dominant horizontal plane is not the
surface of the water, but the level of the walkways that skirt and
bridge the lowered pools. Greenery is limited to evergreen hedges
and a surrounding grove of regularly spaced honey locusts.

There is more than a touch of the Grand Manner in the vastness,

the axial symmetry, and the military precision of the garden, but the
offset walks are obviously designed for strolling rather than parade.

2H^
 Edwin Lutyens: Mughal Gardens (originally the gardens of the Viceroy's

Palace), New Delhi, India, 1911-31.

With its crossed canals, symbolic of the four rivers of Paradise, a
Moslem's garden has been his heaven on earth.
In these national pleasure gardens brilliant foil to bright silk saris
and still the favorite stage for large official parties the British archi-
tect gave new life to the Moslem tradition of northern India. Working
between the levels of the brimful canals and the broad bridges, a

grade difference of less than two feet, he developed a three-dimensional

geometric composition of remarkable richness, remarkable simplicity.
Water dominates, everywhere, but trees and hedges are more important
now than in this early photograph.

gardens and flower gardens 55

 Herbert Bayer: The Grass Mound, Aspen Meadows Hotel,
Aspen, Colorado, 1955.
Sunk within an earth bank forty feet in diameter are a
circular mound, a circular hole, and a rough granite
boulder. From the inside the bank rises above eye-level
to give a sense of enclosure.

The sculptured outdoor room is set easily into a billowy

meadow planted with little groves of quaking aspen and
threaded by the narrow man-made stream visible in the
foreground. At another end of the meadow is the marble
garden shown on page 36.

Ernst Cramer: "Poet's Garden" at the 1959 Garden Exhibi-

tion, Zurich, Switzerland.

Triangular earth mounds and a stepped cone were pre-

cisely edged, grass-sheathed, and doubled by a still pool.

The garden was not so much a garden as sculpture to

walk through abstract earth shapes independent of place,
with sharp arrises foreign to the nature of their material.

56
Paolo Soleri: Cosanti Foundation, Scottsdale, Arizona, begun
1962.
Earth excavated from the desert floor for sunken courts
and vaulted pavilions was carved into inclined planes, one
of which serves as footpath from the entrance courtyard.
The suburban lot was originally level and characterless.

Soleri's partially submerged architecture, turning in on it-

self in unexpected ways, makes a world apart, and its low

profile is a neighborly civility.
 Philip Johnson, architect; James Fanning, landscape architect: The Abby Aldrich Rocke-
feller Sculpture Garden, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1953.
The garden is distinguished by a lively, mutually respectful relationship among
architecture, sculpture, and plants, and by a fine reciprocity between formality and free-

dom. Architectural elements, including pools, are geometric. Planting is not geometric.
Trees are neither clipped nor mathematically spaced, but generally clustered in groups
of a single species cryptomeria, bircli. European hornbeam, or weeping beecli to serve

as space division and scidpture background, or as leafy canopy. Others are decorative

silhouettes against gray brick walls.

Rectangular paving slabs of gray marble unify the two ground planes even as they
encourage free circulation. Inset planting beds are rectilinear, but free of rigidity. Low
planting is massed, with each bed or bank limited to a single kind of permanent ground
cover or transitory flower.
The garden illustrated here is changed and expanded by 1964 and 1984 additions to
the Museum, including two new wings and a glass-walled escalator hall.

J-S^^

58
gardens and flower gardens
 1^ '

Pietro Porcinai, landscape architect; Belgiojoso, Peressutti 8c Rogers, architects: Private

park, Saronno, Italy.
In the Lombardy plain Porcinai has fashioned a private world, walled from its sur-

roundings. The water garden illustrated above is near the entrance, but the gentle rise

of an artificial hill protects it from street noise even as it hides the confining wall and
the porter's lodge. There is something indigenously Italian in the scale and splendor
and sobriety of this concocted landscape, yet no trace of nostalgia for the Italian Ren-
aissance is evident in the rhythmic composition.

60
..V'^

jj^^jg^^SSSWe^^^f'--

Private park, Saronno.

Flowers are concentrated in the viale fio-

rito (left), the flower-carpeted avenue that

bisects the park. Unexpectedly, there is no

terminal focus. The long jagged mat of
massed annuals, changed with the seasons,
is its own reason for existence. Unexpected,
again, is the placing of sculpture ofl^-center
in the grassy verge.

61
Roberto Burle Marx: Carlos Somlo garden, Persepolis, Brazil, 1948.

Characteristic of the fine art of Burle Marx has been the massing of indigenous plants
as a splendid swirling interplay of textured colors that violates neither the integrity of

the individual plant nor the integrity of the large landscape.

The effect is achieved through foliage rather than flowers, and even the lawn, like a
beach at ebb tide, is patterned in waves of green, gray, and yellowish grass.

62
 '^H^.
,^> .^
i^
*

* ^
'V

-A
^^
'*->,

J!??'^-^

r^^ *-**$' ?':-n^^;

r*^\^'# f^B^^^
-<W

;fyii0li

*^
s^^-

Roberto Burle Marx: Delfino garden, Caracas, Venezuela, 1960.

Boulders are set into a hummocky hill sheathed with soft Japanese zoysin and crowned
with feathery grass. At the left are water plants, a miniature pond, and a view back

into the dense shade of a mango grove.

Here is no obvious patterning through contrasts of massed plants, and none of the

"free" forms that unless developed in close relation to ground contours can look as
arbitrarily imposed as the forms of geometry. Far less formal than the artist's best

known gardens of the past, and more developed, this small constructed land-
spatially

scape has the kind of freedom, inner order, and inevitability that we associate with
wildness, yet rarely find so articulately presented in wild nature.

gardens and flower gardens

 Eero Saarinen &: Associates, architects; Sasaki, Walker & Associates, landscape architects:
IBM Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, 1960.
A segment of a circle, the thousand-foot-long building hugs the contours of a crescent
hill and surveys a sweep of country through its glass front.

The rear of the building, shown here, curves around a court dug well back into the
slope. Spanning this dry moat are footbridges leading to employees' parking lots fur-

ther up the hill. The garden, normally seen from above, has no fashionable boulders,
no fussy details only green islands washed by a sea of white gravel and a low yew
hedge to screen ducts and service stairs. The grassy islands, mounded for plastic inter-

est, are a quiet background for willow and crabapple trees.

64
 ^: '0

rk3^ >^

***!^:^

rt'Vt'"-'o;i
LEFT. Ralph Stevens: Succulent garden for Warren Tremainc, Santa Barbara, California,
1949.
High jagged heads of giant yucca and aloe are recalled in great earthborne bursts of
agave that bring the eye down to smaller massed succulents of myriad shapes and
colors. The landscape architect brought plants from many places to form a natural com-
munity and a community that seems natural to this particular sunny slope. Even the
hillocks of Korean grass (Japanese zoysia) that soften the transition from domestic ter-

race to inhospitable spiky succulents support the feeling of ecological validity. Yet there
is no literal imitation of nature: the juxtaposition of colors and forms has the freedom
and eloquence of an abstract j)ainting. Working independently of Burle Marx, Stevens
arrived at some similar conclusions.
Adjoining a house designed for the Tremaines by Richard Neutra, the Stevens garden
seems to be what Neutra called for when he wrote in 1936 that a garden should be "an
ensemble of plants that can keep natural company."

Luis Barragan: Private garden, Mexico, D.F., 1942.

Even in this early garden, designed by Barragan for himself and later sold,
there is an emphatic use of walls not free-standing walls as later at Pedregal
Gardens and Las Arboledas, but massive stone retaining walls. Three such
walls define a rectangular pool (right middle ground) and ascending terraces.

The wall of the middle terrace becomes a stairway as it steps up to tlie top
of the garden. There are no railings, but potted plants suggest safety.

gardens and flower gardens

 v^i

.^r 'n-.*

66

1
 gardens in a natural landscape

More than a building, a garden is difficult to insert into a broad natural land-
scape. If it is not to intrude, its design must be consonant with the natinal
rhythms of the site and the character of the native vegetation. Burle Marx has
shown that planting need not be naturalistic to play an harmonious role in open
country; but this takes great skill.

Exclusion of imported plants would be affectation. What seems more indige-

nous to California and Mexico than Australian eucalyptus? Yet the greatest

designers like to work with plant communities that are native to the site in
appearance if not always in fact.

A garden can belong, and not just to its immediate place, for we know better

than our ancestors that a given site is only part of the whole, and this too can find
expression, even when coherence and continuity and freedom seem difficult to
reconcile with privacy, perhaps also with the desire to create a self-sufficient

work of art. As a Sung landscape painter observed, design can go out at the sides

to suggest the infinity of nature.

In the hands of a true landscape artist the inherent quality of a place is not
ignored, but may be so intensified that man feels here, here in touch with its very
essence. Through art he is placed in communication with its genius.

LEFT AND ABOVE. Robcrto Burlc Marx: Garden for Odete

Monteiro, Correas. near Petropolis, Brazil, 1947.
Shapes of boulders, low plants, and mountains are to a

large extent analogous. Other plants are strong receding

verticals that point to the mountains even as their chang-

ing perspectives bring the distant view actively into the

garden. Plant materials are indigenous, and the garden's
biomorphic plan (above) seems inspired by the natural
contours of the site.

Roberto Burle Marx: Garden for Alberto Kronsforth,

Teresopolis, Brazil, 1956.
Formal and boldly artificial as it is, the curvilinear carpet-
bedding seems less an intrusion than an elaboration of
themes implicit in the natural landscape. .^Juft-* :-Wi.l2i^i#i%

67
 Grounds own
r Philip
house,
Johnson:
New
of
Canaan, Connecticut. Jet buih
the architect's

in 1961,
pavilion in 1963.
Seen from the glass-walled house, perched on a

terrace sixty feet above the artificial pond, water

leaps one-hundred-and-twenty feet into the air to
unify meadows, woods, hills, and sky. Night illumi-
nation is discreetly limited to silver and gold, simu-
lating moonlight and daylight, and the pump is

effectively muffled.

The addition of the water pavilion, built at two-

thirds normal scale, creates strong new tensions in
the landscape. The pavilion extends pinwheel arms
even as it shrinks back into geometric self-sufficiency,
and its diminutive size makes the great jet (unfortu-
nately not photographed at full height) more over-

powering than ever.

68
 Qiger

Thomas D. Church: Garden and pool for Dewey Donnell, Sonoma, California, 1948.

Sculptured island by Adaline Kent.

Related neither to buildings nor to land form, most swimming pools are literally for

swimmers only. This pool is an exception. Its fluid shaping was inspired by the winding
creeks of salt marshes seen through the frame of live oaks. The large landscape is ex-

panded, not denied.

gardens in a natural landscape

 Luis Barragdn: Private gardens in the subdivision of Pedregal Gar-
dens, Mexico, D.F., 1949-51.
If the land had been developed according to Barragan's concep-
tion, response to the unique splendor of the volcanic site would
have been brilliant. He specified large lots with high peripheral
walls built of the rough local lava rock, in its own purplish black
or occasionally stained with color, and opened up here and there
by fences of tall iron pickets (page 50). Rising and falling with the
land, and affirming rather than denying its character and continu-
ity, the majestic walls were to enclose houses of quiet but imequiv-
ocally modern design and gardens that would respect both the
existing lava formations and the extraordinary natural vegetation.
There was to be no gentling, no formalizing, no petty prettifying.

Illustrated at left and right are model gardens in which he incor-

porated some of his ideas. Steps are carved into the living rock and
the level lawn looks as though it had been poured between the con-
gealed waves of lava. Walls of the same dark stone are so disposed
that the somber mountains seem drawn into the garden. The fan-

tastic beauty of native plants and rocks is somehow made more

accessible by the hand of man.
The garden shown below is different. Here art intensifies nature
less by entering and changing it than by separating itself in a strange
reciprocal relationship. The push of writhing wilderness into the

neat rectangular pool seems ominous.

70
 .?:*,/ ^4.;

k- '^S

-=^^.~

l^v^n:^-

^^^^"^^^^

'# *%^x^.

"ii^ ,..*.-\f
-^^
if^lS'^^

.<ftiS-i

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%* v^

^M.;.

.*^.
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'^i^
 ABOVE AND RIGHT. Jciis Jenscn: Columbus Park, Chicago, 1918.
Jensen was working within the great landscape tradition when
early in this century he brought to metropolitan Chicago the essence
of the Illinois prairies as he understood them.
"Take native plants," he said, "and let them govern each other."
This was understatement. A fine sense of ecological fitness was indeed
the basis for his work Columbus Park, but it was with a highly de-
at

veloped feeling for formal and spatial relationships that he laid out
meadows and waters, planted forests of maple and oak, elm and ash,
and emphasized the low horizontals of his vision with masses of wild
roses and native shrubs. The park was as deliberately composed as
Noguchi's marble "landscape."

72
constructed landscapes

In the eighteenth century land preserved its basic integrity: town was town,

country was country, and wilderness needed no Congressional guaranty.

Now
its genius
the land has been so ironed out by urban sprawl, so grayed down, that
will often be sought in vain.

The artist in this case starts with a more or less clean slate. He may use the

opportunity to concoct a wholly artificial composition, a lunar landscape dis-

connected from its particular place on earth. Or he may choose to set limits to

his own freedom. Preserving and enhancing any possibly positive

values of the

site, and keeping in mind the characteristic land forms

of the region as well as

its native flora, he may compose a landscape

that will seem at once free and

inevitable.

In a manner of speaking, every work of landscape art is a fresh construction.

Even if the designer does nothing more than add or subtract a single tree, he

re-creates the scene by his will to form.

Isamu Noguchi, sculptor; Skidmore, Owings 8c

Merrill, architects: Sunken court in the plaza of

the Beinecke Rare Book Library, Yale University,

New Haven, Connecticut, 1963.
Noguchi has carved an "imaginary landscape"
of white marble. On the grooved platform are
three symbolic shapes a pyramid (matter), a hol-

low disc (the sun, or energy), and a poised cube

(chance, or the condition of man).

73
 Skidmore, Owings &: architects; Sasaki, Walker & Associates,
Merrill,

landscape consultants: The Upjohn Company, Kalamazoo, Michigan,

1961.
The architects have developed their own way of dealing with the

large office building that is set in spacious country. In this character-

istic example the building complete with formal terraces and court-

yards page 20) is raised above the idealized

(see
on a
landscape

broad fieldstone podium. Rectangular basins reach out to parking lots

at either side, but the line of demarcation

between geometric and
non-geometric is otherwise firmly drawn.
Within the formal quincunx planting of pines that protects the
site, the landscape architects have constructed
a scene in-
eighty-acre
Michigan's lake-dotted countryside. Willows were planted
spired by
along the man-made lagoons, birches on middle ground, pines and sugar

maples above.

74
 Skidmore, Owings R: Merrill: Connecticut
General Life Insurance Company, Bloom-
field, Connecticut, 1957.
Office building and formal terrace are
again decisively separated from gently nat-
uralized surroundings.
The view from the building (below) was
carefully composed in the landscape style.
An eighteenth-century Englishman might be
puzzled by Noguchi's "Family Group" in red

sandstone, but he would understand the

broad sweep of meadow down to the ser-
pentine pond, the disposition of trees, and
the rise to the focal sculpture, silhouetted
against dense woods.

constructed landscapes
 1. Entrance
2. Crematorium
3. Cross
4. Pond and
ceremonial site

5. Meditation place
 Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz: Forest Cemetery (Skogskyrko-
gorden), Stockholm. Commissioned as result of a 1914 international com-
petition. Executed 1917-40. Crematorium and ceremonial site designed by
Asplund and built 1937-40. (See also pages 78-79.)
Confronting cross and sky, mourners walk the long upward path to the

crematorium, then follow the ashes to their burial place in the pine forests.

Experience of earth and sky is intense.

This is a created landscape, for the northern part of the tract came to

hand as a nondescript pine-covered slope hollowed by gravel pits. Now it

is transformed into a world apart and one moves within a vast earth sculp-
ture, shaped by great grassy mounds that screen off the sight and sound of
adjacent highway and rapid transit line. Motor traffic is removed from the
main approach, which is reserved for the pedestrian.

constructed landscapes 77
78
Forest Cemetery, Stockholm (continued).
The atrium of the crematorium looks across a man-
made pond to the paved apron which Asplund conceived
as a site for great public funeral services. Crowning the

rise are the low walls of a meditation place, with sparse

delicate trees silhouetted against the enormous sky and

the vast rolling surface of the earth.
From the cemetery entrance one sees that steps, carved
into the slope of the further mound, mount to the retreat

at its summit.

constructed landscapes
 buildings and the land

In pre-industrial societies man is so close to the land that he seems unable to

do it visible wrong. Villages and towns appear to grow out of the ground, and
temples seem dedicated to the genius loci as well as to the gods above. All this has
changed. Even farming has become an industry and a business. Now the old feel- Frank Lloyd Wright: Taliesin West,
ing for the land is recaptured only occasionally, by design, and rarely at a scale the architect's winter camp near
Scottsdale, Arizona. Begun 1937.
larger than that of an individual building and its parcel of ground.
Sloping walls were molded of
One school of thought insists that architecture, the pure creation of man's
coarse concrete and great desert
spirit, be wholly independent of its natural setting, to which it then serves as
rocks rose, gold, rust, green, gray,
complement and foil. Although, as ex-Dean Hudnut of Harvard observed, a orange-rimmed, quartz-streaked, and
meadow with a house in it is meadow without a house,
not quite the same as a black-speckled. Above went a

yet the integrity of a landscape is at least theoretically preserved when buildings slanted roof of redwood and canvas.
With its formal triangular ter-
stand aloof, self-contained, respectfully alien, and when neither gardens nor ter-
race, jutting out into the wilder-
races mediate between what is strictly architectural and what is natural or nat-
ness like the prow of a ship, Tali-
uralized. Implied in the contrast is a relationship of a kind the dynamic esin West is a "platform house"
relationship of opposites. The concept goes back, of course, to eighteenth-century penetrated by the desert. Woven
England (page 9), where rough-cropped meadows lapped the elegant walls of into its fabric are rocks, cactus,

Palladian great houses, but it was given new life and form in our own century by mountain, light. Its space is the
space of the desert, made accessible
Le Corbusier, particularly in those famous buildings that hover free of the ground
to man through art.
on stilts, with fields and ponds brought up to the supports, even washing beyond
them, and all provision for outdoor living relegated to the roofs.
Other architects prefer to modify the pure landscape style. Evidently agreeing
with Humphrey Repton (d. 1818) that "the gardens or pleasure grounds near a

house may be considered as so many apartments belonging to its state, its com-
fort, and its pleasure," they arrange indoor and outdoor living space together as

a geometric entity, raised upon a low platform and set upon a countryside other-

wise disturbed as little as possible.

A third approach makes no fast distinction between the artifact and the facts

of nature. Buildings are not strangers to the land, for everything is done to give

a sense of interpenetration betw-een architecture and its natural surroundings.

This is the kind of design originally associated with Frank Lloyd Wright, whose
firm stipulation was that a building finally appear to belong to its site of it,

not on it; and it was his sensitive response to the individuality of a site that made
him superbly a landscape artist. Luis Barragan: Street intersection,
A spiralling urban population makes the large problems of land use infinitely Las Arboledas, State of Mexico,

we move toward environment that will affirm life 1958-62.

complex, but if are to a total
The long stucco wall runs over
in rich diversity, patterns of living and building must again be brought into har-
the horizon to affirm the continu-
mony with the land; and since each place on earth is unique, we must trust the
ity of the land. Foil to the upswept
beguiling abstractions of master plans only when they conserve and intensify the wall is the tilted plane of the traf-
elusive realities of their very particular sites. fic island.

80
 Le Corbusier: Apartment house at Nantes-Reze, France, 1955.
Precisely defined as a closed volume and lifted from the ground on
stilts, the building is as independent of its surroundings as it could
well be. No terraces, no gardens. Architecture and landscape pre-

serve their separate identities, and outdoor living is relegated to the

rooftop as at Marseilles (page 23).

buildings and the land 81

 m lip- .^i^'\ijri~"^ji
^^"mPlYfl: MTWTW'
-jj

'
\ Wl\ I r
mill
'!

i .
i

'
/J. I

IV 'v^ / I
'1/ / I// .* / y .' ' /

Eliot Noyes: House of the architect, New Canaan, Connecticut, 1955.

The garden may be set within the building in archetypal manner to make a human
enclave in the howling wilderness.

Edward L. Barnes: Henry Kaufmann Campgrounds, Wyandanch, New York, 1962.

Eye-shaped swimming pools and concrete walks follow the contours of the slope at
three different levels. Their fluid lines are broken and invigorated by the sudden and
logical right angles of the cross-contour steps that connect them.

'';
^^^X^.v^'""

;--"^^*|gr'
 Edward L. Barnes: Robert Osborn house, Salisbury, Connecticut, 1951.
Indoor and outdoor living space form a geometric entity, an island in the flowery

fields. In the architect's words, "The contrast between untouched nature and the area
for living is dramatized in the platform plan. The garden is conceived as part of the
house. Its wall is an extension of the house foundation; enclosed terraces complement
inside spaces. Shade trees make a leafy outdoor ceiling."

buildings and the land 83

 Serge Chermayeff, architect; Christopher Tunnard, landscape con-
sultant: Chermayeff house, near Halland, Sussex, England, 1937.
Set with its living-gardens on a low brick platform at the edge of

the woods, the house maintains its separate identity, yet extends long
arms to embrace the gentle Sussex countryside.
The beech forest was carefully thinned as it met the meadow, and
thousands of daffodils were scattered beneath the trees. At the glass-

sheltered end of the projecting terrace, splendid against the idyllic

background, was a large reclining figure by Henry Moore.
Looking back on his work, Chermayeff said that "shaping the place"
was more important than the house itself.

84
 Alvar Aalto: Maison Carre, Bazoches, near Paris, 1961.

Broad, loosely planted steps, set easily into the contours, modulate
the passage from geometry to nature, and anchor the house firmly to

the ground.

buildings and the land

New York State Department of
Public Works: Upper reaches of
the Taconic State Parkway, New
York, 1933-63.
Northbound and southbound
roadways are independent, each
free to pursue its future along the
natural contours most favorable to
it. There is a minimum of cut and
fill, of new planting, of tampering
of any kind. Woods and fields and
rock outcrops are penetrated by
concrete ribbons that are less an
interruption of the landscape than
an affirmation of its topography.

Luis Barragan: Main boulevard,

Pedregal Gardens, Mexico, D.F.,

1949.
Highway and landscape encroach
upon each other, yet maintain sepa-

rate integrities. Their relationship

is as violent as the volcanic waste-

land itself a sea of lava with petri-

fied waves.

86
Charles Eames: Fames house, Pacific Palisades, California, 1949.

Composed of two austere boxes, the house defers to the landscape

only in its imaginative placement.
Rather than destroy the beautiful natural meadow high over the
ocean, Eames pushed his house far back into the steep hillside, beliind

the shelter of giant eucalyptus trees. The excavated earth he used to

make a protective mound on the one adjacent property line.

Planted with rye grass yellow in the dry season and with a scat-

tering of wild flowers, the meadow has reverted to nature, and the
house seems alone in the world with its wild windblown garden and
the sea.

buildings and the land

^"^'^-^*^
ABOVE. Frank Lloyd Wright, Aaron G. Green, and The Taliesin Asso-
ciates: Marin County Civic Center, San Rafael, California.
When finally completed according to the plans of 1958, the build-
ing will double its present length, and the tiered arches of the new
block will die away against the slopes of a large freestanding mound
far off to the left, out of the picture.
Wright's usual practice was to run his buildings parallel with the
natural contours. Here he has built across the contours, yet without
loss of harmony between architecture and landscape. Contributing to
the rightness of the building in its setting is the analogy between the
low segmental arches, the flattened dome, and the gentle earth mounds
peculiar to the region.

Burnham Hoyt: Red Rocks Amphitheater for Denver, Morrison, Colo-

rado, 1941.
Fitted into the slope of the eastern foothills of the Rockies as they
riseabruptly from the Colorado plateau, the music theater lies be-
tween huge natural outcrops of upthrusting red sandstone. Each seat
looks over the stage to a shimmer of plains melting into the far Hat
horizon, at night to the distanct twinkle of city lights.

89
90
 .2^.

'.^^,,
*

tifi^ .iJV- a*!a9

Frank Lloyd Wright: Taliesin, the architect's own house

at Spring Green, Wisconsin. 1911, 1914, 1925.
The transition from house and studio to courtyards,

gardens and farm buildings, and on to meadows and or-

chards, fields and woodland, is scarcely perceptible, so

subtly is one part related to another and all to the con-

Alden B. Dow: House and garden of the architect, Mid- tours and character of the land.
land, Michigan, 1941. "I knew well," Wright wrote in his autobiography, "that
Architecture, water, and native plants are interwoven no house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should
with an art that is ultimately self-effacing. The indivisi-
be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live
bility of house and setting is affirmed by the rhythmic de- together each the happier for the other."
scent of gently sloped roofs, to end over a living room sunk
into the pond affirmed again by the concrete building
blocks that step out into the water as though finally freed
of rational constraints.

buildings and the land

Oscar Niemeyer: House for the architect. Rio de Janeiro, 1954.
Perforated by a pool and punctuated by a monstrous boulder, the sculptured terrace
elaborates the bold irregular curves of the roof slab that overshadows it. Niemeyer's

retreat is a powerfully assertive, yet harmonious new force among the bold irregular

curves of the wild landscape.

92
 Frank Lloyd Wright: Fallingwater, house for Edgar J. Kaufmann, Sr.,

Bear Run, near Mill Run, Pennsylvania, 1937. (Given to the Western
Pennsylvania Conservancy in 1963, Fallingwater is now open to the
public.)
The house is set boldly into the wild with no terrace or garden as
passage of transition, yet with an empathy between structure and
landscape that is very different from the studied isolation of Le Cor-
busier's buildings.

Stone quarried from nearby ledges makes the massive piers. Canti-
levered from them are the great reinforced-concrete slabs which carry
the living space out over the water and recall, in their rhythmic stratifi-

cation, the jutting ledges of the streambed.

buildings and the land

 / have nothing against art, hut all the same, it's a
pretty dull and narrow affair compared with a
world view in lohich all of nature spoke to man.
Claude Levi-Strauss

since 1964
Changes in attitude toward the natural environment have come faster than ever
before, and most dramatically in the United States, where our traditional notion
of endless frontiers and limitless God-given resources was quite suddenly perceived
as dangerous nonsense. Even as issues of civil rights and Vietnam involvement
polarized our society and alienated our young, belated recognition of galloping
pollution and waste of precious resources brought us into battle on another front,
this time with the very premises of our careless industrial society. As the concerns
of the few became the concerns of the many, we started dreaming of a simpler
kind of life that would be founded on respect for the earth and for the productiv-

ity of our own hands. Even middle-aged suburbanites scurried out to raise
"organic" vegetables.
Professional attention turned to ecologically sound land-use planning at large
scale, based on detailed site analysis such as the map-overlay technique devised by
Ian McHarg. Not building came to seem as important as building: in 1971, year
four of the Whole Earth Catalog, a coveted PA Design Citation went to a non-
architectural scheme for lyrically unobtrusive camping on fifty-five rolling Texas
acres. Preservation of natinal areas became a matter of great concern, less for

man's continuing enjoyment and education than for his long-term smvival, which
may depend upon the protection of ecological and genetic diversity from further
depredation. Where valid native landscape no longer exists it has on occasion been
concocted, but Barrel Morrison sees his only partial sticcess in a diligently scien-
tific effort to duplicate the original Wisconsin prairie as yet another warning that
preservation is far preferable to attempts at reconstruction.

Everyone in the Western world who could read or hear has in these two decades
been exposed to the fact that Homo sapiens is this planet's rude and possibly
temporary guest, not its lord. That new general awareness, coupled with the

rebellious mood of much of the period, might have been expected to provoke an
esthetic revolution in landscape design some such major change as occurred in
eighteenth-century England (page 9), when a suddenly more comfortable feeling
about nature produced the great "landscape style." But now we see no revolution,
no widely shared agreement on a concept of design appropriate to our troubled

times. Instead there are a few isolated creative spirits, here and abroad, each mak-
ing his own truth, and none seeming to offer a theoretical base capable of initi-

ating and sustaining a movement.

94
1962
Rachel Carson's Silent Spring

1964
Wilderness Act

1965
Highway Beautification Act

1966
Rare and Endangered Species Act

1968
Wild and Scenic Rivers Act

1969
National Environmental Policy Act
Ian McHarg's Design ivith Nature

1970
The first Earth Day

1972
Coastal Zone Management Act
The Limits to Groioth ("Club of
Rome report")

1973
Energy crisis

E. F. Schumacher's 5???rt// is Beautiful

1981-83
James Watt, Secretary of the Interior

Berkeley, California, 1969.

War between Man and Nature? No, merely a dutiful policeman uprooting illegal plant-

ings in the bloody People's Park skirmish of the War between Students and the Establish-
ment, a conflict which erupted in 1964 with the Free Speech Movement of the University's

highly politicized students and intensified with growing national protest against American
involvement in Vietnam.
In April several hundred students and local residents had, without permission, con-
verted a large vacant lot, owned by the University, into an instant pleasance which they
named People's Park. On May 15th armed police moved in to clear the park and guard
construction of a chain-link fence which would assert University ownership. The symbols
seemed so clear countercultural flowers vs. fence and weaponry that six thousand angry
people marched to the site. Stones were thrown. The response was tear gas, birdshot,
buckshot, and activation of the National Guard.

95
 On the not unreasonable assumption that a designed landscape reveals its

designer's perception of the man/nature relationship, the introduction to this

book identified three different mind sets: man as lord of creation, or as respectful

alien, or as participant within a whole. Few designs fit neatly and completely into
any one of these subjective, slippery categories, yet they can be useful in discussion.

Lord of creation is the role assumed by those few latter-day Le Notres who
propose to impose upon land and plants the grand order of their favored archi-

tectural and urban forms, generally with heavy but "witty" reference to the
classical past. To a dedicated formalist, nature presents no counter-claim and a
tree is little more than a remarkably pretty, regrettably recalcitrant building
material. But no important example of classicizing landscape design has ap-
parently yet been executed, and most postmodernists handle the settings of their
neo-Mannerist or neo-neoclassic or neo-Deco or neo- Vegas structures in one of the
modest ways described on page 80.

Far more characteristic of today's high art than Baroque axes and topiary is a

good measure of humility before the facts and forces of the natural world. The
purest statement of alienation and awe may be SITE's forest-invaded non-
architecture, which metaphorically concedes nature's superior strength and ulti-

mate victory. Working out of more complex concerns, De Maria deflects the

course of nearby lightning only to play up its frightful power; Halprin at Port-

land and Johnson at Fort Worth dramatize as never before the fearfulness of
water; and even Barragan has occasionally set up disturbing confrontations, as on
page 50, between geometry and vegetation.
But Barragan is basically a mystic. Like Frank Lloyd Wright, he feeds our
latent sense of participation in some indefinable whole. The universe? When
Charles Jencks, analyst of recent architecture, complains that Barragan suggests
"cosmic meanings which are nevertheless hermetic and inaccessible to a wide
audience," he overlooks the possibility that the extraordinary experience pro-
ferred by Barragan may be as available to the illiterate as to the elite, only in part

because his ever more powerful color does not lend itself to facile theorizing.

Whereas his post-Pedregal work affirms the flatness of the ground and seeks no
change of level, the house built in Spain by his admirer, Ambasz, steps down into

the earth and up into the sky in cosmic imagery so patent as perhaps to satisfy

Jencks himself. Scarpa's great cemetery (page 110 and back cover) is rich in tradi-

tional, easily deciphered symbol, but its all-pervasive step motif is wonderfully
ambiguous.
To quote from the 1964 preface, we share only om- uncertainties. Ambiguity is

the one tie that binds present-day landscape designers. The self-referential grid of

repeated squares, so handsomely developed in the 1950s, is dead; and even our
committed formalists wilfully pervert their projected classic symmetries. Our
mood runs to the open-ended, the indeterminate, for clarity is behind us, or in
front of us, but not ours at this point in time.

96
Walter De Maria: The Lightning Field, New Mexico, 1977.
In the late 1960s sculptors came out of their studios to attack the natural landscape at
vast scale. Michael Heizer, displacer of forty thousand tons of Nevada (1969), and Robert
Smithson, modeler of Great Salt Lake's fifteen-hundred-foot Spiral Jetty (1970), can be
compared only to Gutzon Borglum (Four Presidents Monument, Black Hills, South
Dakota, 1925-41) in the boldness with which they changed the face of nature. Re-
membered from 1940, a girl peering into the Grand Canyon Oh my, ivhat a lot of dam-
age! Older looman That's not damage, dear, that's Art.

De Maria and Christo, rather than change the earth, complement it by opening a
window into the cosmos. Too well known to require illustration are Christo's outrageous
but properly temporary statements: the plastic-wrapped mile of Australian coastal cliffs

(1969), the two-hundred-foot-high orange curtain slung between two Colorado peaks

(1972), and in California the Running Fence of 1976.

The Lightning Field has little of Christo's extravagance. Into the wide desert valley
De Maria inserted a regular grid of four hundred stainless-steel rods, spaced two hundred
twenty feet apart and varied in height (averaging just under twenty-one feet) to bring

their pointed tops into alignment above the rough terrain. The sight of these delicately

drawn verticals, glinting under sun and moon in counterpoint to their rugged natural

setting, is profoundly moving even without lightning.

 .>^

'X*-*^^

1^^ \ -^
'

SITE, architects: Forest Building, Best Products Company,

9008 Quioccasin Road, Henrico County, Richmond, Virginia,
1979-80.
As though Martians or dinosaurs were one morning found
encamped in the middle of Route 1, a hopelessly ordinary
commercial building is split apart by forest.
The joke, of course, is different in kind from the histori-

cizing witticisms of postmodernism. If it is a one-liner, as

some have charged, it carries an unusually heavy load of
metaphor. SITE's "de-architecture" stands conventional as-

sumptions on their heads as it shatters the finite static box

with a shocking assertion of indeterminacy, change, mortal-
ity. Just as the Berkeley news photo on page 95 can be read
as modern man's savaging of nature, so Best's
out of context
Richmond showroom suggests that violated natural systems
fight back, perhaps to win.

98
 Office for Metropolitan Architecture, London Ijranch (Rem Koolhaas):
Project awarded second place in the Pare de la Villette competition,
Paris, 1982-83.

Tf^ Although the mission of a great city is to encourage productive inter-

HI
>- i i 1l_
action of diverse people and things, activities and ideas, the large urban
park is traditionally a bucolic retreat. Mitterrand proposed a novel
facility when he announced in 1982 a competition for the design of a
park, on one hundred major ring road,
thirty-six desolate acres off Paris's
n I MMM I Ml ^''Kvw.Mii
which would be an active generator of invention, education, and enter-
tainment. Provision was required both for physical recreation and for
multiple overlapping activities in science, technology, and the arts, pri-
marily through thematic "discovery gardens."
The architects span the Hat site with fifty-meter east-west bands, each
devoted to a different program category. Long boundaries encourage
interpenetration of adjacent activities, and people walking on north-
south paths would have unexpected educational and recreational en-
counters. The planting plan (left) shows screens of trees set between the
bands to suggest a depth of varying landscapes even as they provide an
intelligible three-dimensional framework.

M. Paul Friedberg, landscape architect: Pomerance X:

Breines, architects: Riis Plaza, Jacob Riis Houses,

East 6th to East 10th Streets at Avenue D, New York,
1965-66.
As customary in 1949, public-housing barracks for
eight thousand people had been embellished with a

grassy mall guarded from use by chain-link fencing.

Funds from the Vincent Astor Foundation trans-

formed those three acres into a jolly, lively plaza en-

thusiastically approved by its users. Fences and grass
were replaced by a handsome series of outdoor rooms,
paved to permit free circulation and shaped at varied

levels as adventure playgrounds, quieter sitting areas,

and a sunken multi-use amphitheater. Water plays an
important role as spray, runnel, and shallow pool.

,4 '^Sf

since 1964

99
Allan Greenberg: Proposal for a park in mid-town
Manhattan, New York, 1979.
Greenberg was commissioned by The Museum of
Modern Art to redesign an existing mid-block public
walkway consisting of a broad corridor and a scjuare
defined by an adjacent office tower and older low
work by Lutyens prior to the
buildings. Recalling
Mughal Gardens (page 55), the architect remodelled
the corridor as classical allee, roofed by a gilded
Baroque trellis, then used an elaborately sculptured
twenty-foot hedge to transform the square into a semi-
circle centered by a water-domed octagonal pavilion.

Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo. architects; Dan

Kiley, landscape architect: The Ford Foundation, 320
East 43rd Street, New York, 1963-69.
First of the multi-story greenhouses which have be-
come familiar in office buildings and hotels, this great

glazed garden may still be the most attractive. Shel-

tered by the glass walls and roof of the building's
southeast corner and overlooked by the sliding glass of
twelve floors of offices, the base garden covers a third
of an acre and a thirteen-foot level change. Temperate-
zone plants, dominant, include the mighty southern
magnolia. Above, gardens hang from the third, fourth,
fifth, and eleventh floors.
Zion &: Breen: Paley Park, 3 East 53rd Street, New
York, 1965-68.
New York's first vest-pocket park, this privately en-
dowed haven for mid-town shoppers and workers is

an outdoor room of remarkable civility. The vine-clad

sidewalls vertical lawns, Zion calls them are those
of adjacent buildings. Honey locusts branch out as

light-dappling canopy and the cascade of the far

water-wall submerges street noise. Contributing to

one's peaceful pleasure are inexpensive refreshments
and generous seating arrangements.

Since 1964

101
 Affleck Desbarats Dimakopoulos Lebensold Sise, archi-

tects (R. T. Affleck, partner-in-charge); Sasaki, Dawson,

Demay Associates, landscape architects: Hotel Bona-
venture, Montreal, 1962-67.
One would not guess that the garden inn pictured
above crowns the formidable bulk of the Place Bona-
venture and rests on an international trade center, five
levels of Merchandise Mart, two levels of exhibition

space, two levels of retail shops, and eighteen railroad

tracks. The four hundred hotel rooms ranged along
the periphery of the roof are separated by an inner
ring of gardens from the public rooms at the center.
Earlier roof gardens, other than Le Corbusier's,
seem afterthoughts when compared to this, carved into

the mass of the building, and to those on the facing

page.

102
 """""^ ^" -*--
m:it^:z ^'''- '^-^-p^ o^^'-'^

jviu!,eum, (Jakland, c'vi '"'f:'

Zrlt^'V
California, 1961-69

"""',' ' "*''"" """""" ' "'Sh. Lave been

counter Gertrude Stent s famous
w. h a ntonutuent which
Instead the five-acre
d.sparagemen, of Oakland C'There is
would shout defiance to San FrancsL
.emp.ec, ,o
o there he,e"l'
across the ba
site, originally a park,
was kept as a park-bu, now a park
pos d.n large part of the roof
com-
gardens and terraces of the low.
irregularly stepped pyr"

s^: ::;:: L'':;-

'''' ^""-^ ""^-^
' "--' -" "-^ 'y ''>-M>eTo .tZr
geometry Kiley threw a lovely veil
of greenery.
With these hanging garden,s Oakland
eloquently affirms its presence.

103
Lawrence Halprin &: Associates: Portland Open Space Sequence, Port-
land, Oregon, 1961-68.
A walk to the central city through this redeveloped area is an adven-
ture. Each of the three one-acre plazas alone would be a rare pleasure.

Joined as they are by traffic-free footways, enjoyment is compounded by

an artful ordering of sensuous and emotional response.
Halprin's understanding of the streams and cascades of the High
Sierras is first evident in Lovejoy Plaza (right), where stepped "moun-
tains" invite all comers to enter into the waterplay. Most likely drenched,

one then proceeds to peaceful Pettigrove Park, a shady retreat where

grassy mounds suggest privacy. Then on through the greenway to the
thundering grandeur of the auditorium forecourt (below) with its ab-

straction, eighty feet wide, of a great natural waterfall. Running gently

at first, water gathers force as it drops down the "cliffs" to crash into the
pool. The rectangular slabs at the base pile up as though shoved by
floods.

Neither this park sequence nor Philadelphia's (page 38) is in mid-

town, where continuity is more difficult to achieve.
 ?id(c'9'tn<AMTmHi> ' 5(v?p

^ j^W^l/M

TO f-r L^'>\k>

since 1964
 Philip Johnson and John Burgee, architects; Zion &: Breen,
landscape considtants: Fort Worth Water Garden, Fort
Worth. Texas. 1970-74.
Broad steps, straight-edged but irregular, transform the
flat land into solid/ void, moiuitain/ water. Ascending, they
are planted terraces; descending into the maelstrom, they
are water-stairs for fearless Texans. Gift to the city of the
Anion G. Carter Foundation, the Water Garden covers a full

block near downtown Fort Worth.

Artificially contrived as they are, the running, falling

waters of Fort VV^orth and Portland (pages 104-105) seem far

more "natural" than yesterday's jets.

f4
^''%
SWA Group/Sausalito, landscape architects (George Hargreaves, project
designer); Gensler 8: Associates, architects: Harlequin Plaza, 7600 East

Orchard Road, Greenwood Village, Englewood, Colorado, 1980-82.

As disorienting in actuality as in this photograph, the plaza defies the
bleak ordinariness of Denver's suburban sprawl. Two low mirror-image,
mirror-surfaced office buildings break for a court bisected by a swathe
of harlequin-patterned pavement which points west to distant snow-
capped Rocky Mountains. Meclianical elements of under-plaza garage
and services erupt through the black-and-white terrazzo diamonds
boiler flue as skewed black tower, chiller (right foreground) as mirror-

clad box. A high red wall tapers down as it runs west through the plaza
to end below a converging purple wall. Rarely visible between them is

a narrow watercourse embellished with jets which dwindle in height as

they move west. Despite this forced perspective the mountains do not
actively enter the scene. Nature is vividly engaged, but only as mirrored

reflections of shifting clouds. Buildings and courtyard, inseparable, dis-

solve in ambiguity. N -^

107
 Emilio Ambasz: House near Cordoba, Spain, 1979-82.
(Photographs of the completed building are not
available.)

The sunken patio of this weekend retreat is defined

on two sides by living quarters, on the other two sides
by tall white walls. Living space runs cool beneath the
rolling wheat-field to curving slits of light and air at

the periphery. The tall walls at their juncture are

punctured by a ground-level entrance from which
steps fan down to the courtyard; and from the court-

yard a narrow stair, water burbling in its scalloped

handrail, runs up each white wall to a balcony perched
high above the entrance and dedicated to meditation.

108
^J^V"*

William Morgan: Dunehouse, Atlantic Beach, Florida,

1974-75.
Dunehouse presents mystery to beachcombers, just

another sand dune to grateful neighbors, and duplex

apartments to its two tenants. The eyes are terraces
fronting glass-ended living rooms, and the building's
curving concrete shell, unobtrusive in this setting,

carries its heavy load of earth and plants more effi-

ciently than the flat roof customary in modern earth

shelters.

Energy conservation through built-in protection

against extreme temperatures is of course the main
reason for growing interest in earth shelters; but re-

treat into the ground, with or without earth cover, is

an act of self-effacement with impact that can be social

and spiritual as well as visual. (See also Soleri's

Cosanti Foundation, page 57.)

109

LEFT. Gianni Avon, Francesco Tentori, and Marco
Zanuso: New Cemetery, Longarone, Italy, 1969-73.
"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the
shadow of death. . .
."

BELOW. Carlo Scarpa: Brion-Vega Cemetery, San Vito

de Altivole, Treviso, Italy, 1970-72. (Illustrated in

color on the back cover.)

This private cemetery, Scarpa's masterwork, cele-

brates the union of opposites life/death, male/female,

advance /re treat, fullness /emptiness.
The focal tomb is in plan a circle. Above is a canopy
'''[' of vine-clad arches, their curves reflected in grassy steps.
^''^ f^r Ascending and descending arcs join heaven and earth.
Tltroughout the cemetery, steps are the persistent
theme: steps for stepping on, steps that lose them-
selves in water, and above all, steps molded into the
concrete of buttresses, beams, walls, roofs, entrances
advancing and receding in rhythmic counterplay that
recalls such forgotten wisdom as one might ascribe to

Assyria or pre-Columbian Mitla. These intricately

stepped moldings might earn Frank Lloyd Wright's

approval as "organic ornament."

110
index

Page numbers in parentheses indicate refer- Greenbcrg, Allan: 100 Office for Metropolitan Architecture.
ences in the text. Other page numbers indi- Gropius, Walter: (21) London: 99
cate illustrations. Guevrckian, Gabriel: 52 Olmsted, Frederick Law: (10)

Halprin, Lawrence: 24-25, 52, (96), 104-

Philadelphia City Planning Commission:
105
38-39
Hansen, Sven: 46
Pomerance & Breines: 99
Aalto, Alvar: 85 Harbeson Hough Livingston & Larson:
Pope, Alexander: (11)
Affleck Desbarats Dimakopoulos Leben- 39
Porcinai, Pietro: 60-61
sold Sise: 102 Hargreaves, George: 107
Ambasz, Emilio: (96), 108 Heizer, Michael: (97)
Asplund, Gunnar: 28, 76-79 Hertzka &: Knowles: 42, 44-45 Repton, Humphrey: (10), (80)

Avon, Gianni: 1 10 Horiguchi, Sutemi: 21 Robinson, William: (51)

Hoyt, Burnham: 88-89 Roche, Kevin, &: John Dinkeloo: 100, 103

Bacon, Edmund N.: (38) Rudofsky, Bernard: 16

Barnes, Edward L.: 82, 83 Jekyll, Gertrude: (51)
Barragan, Luis: 33, 34-35. 50, (51). 65, Jencks, Charles: (96) Saarinen, Eero & Associates: 64
70-71, 86, (96); color plates on front Jensen, Jens: 72-73 Sand, George: (27)
cover and facing p. 33 and p. 80 Johnson, Philip: 27, 58-59, 68, (96), 106 Sasaki, Dawson. Demay Associates: 102
Bayer, Herbert: 36, 56 Sasaki, Walker R; Associates: 20, 64. 74
Belgiojoso, Peressutti & Rogers: 60-61 Kahn, Louis L: 41 Scarpa, Carlo: (96). 110; color plate on
Blom, Holger: 29,31,40 Kent, William: (10) back cover
Borglum, Gutzon: (97) Kiley, Dan: 39, 54, 100, 103
SITE: (96), 98
Brown, Lancelot (Capability): 9. (10), 10, Koolhaas, Rem: 99 Skidmore, Owings k Merrill: (10), 20, 42,

(11), (42) 44-45. 49, 54, 73. 74. 75

Burgee, John: 106 Langkilde, Eywin: 46 Smithson, Robert: (97)
Burle Marx, Roberto: 37, 48. (51). 53. 62. Le Corbusier: (10), (17), 18, 22, 23, 32, Soleri, Paolo: 57, (109)
63, (65), 66-67. (67); color plate facing Sorensen, C. Th.: 47
(48), (80), 81, (93), (102)
p. 48 Le Notre, Andre: 4, (14), (29), (96) Stein, Gertrude: (103)
Lewerentz, Sigurd: 76-79 Stevens, Ralph: color plate facing p. 65
Chermayeff. Serge: 84 Lipchitz, Jacques: (27) Stockholm Park Department: 18-19, 28,
Christo: (97) Lutyens, Edwin: 55, (100) (29), 40
Church. Thomas D.: 69 Stone, Edward D.: 26
Cramer, Ernst: 57 Markelius, Sven: 31 SWA Group/ Sausalito: 107
McHarg. Lan: 40, (94)

De Maria, Walter: (96), 97 Milles, Carl: 36 Taliesin Associates: 89

Dow, Alden B.: 90 von Moltke, Wilhelm V.: 39 Tentori, Francesco: 110
Downing, Andrew Jackson: (10) Moore, Henry: (84) Tunnard, Christopher: 84
Morgan, William: 109
Eames, Charles: 87 Morrison, Darrel: (94) Vaux, Calvert: (10)

Friedberg, M. Paul: 99 Neutra, Richard: (65) Wright, Frank Lloyd: (15), (80), 89, 91,
New York State Department of Public 93, 94, (96), (110); color plate facing
Gensler & Associates: 107 Works: 86 p. 80
Girard, Alexander: 53 Niemeyer, Oscar: 92
Glemme, Erik: 18-19 Noguchi, Isamu: 41, 49, 73. (75) Zanuso, Marco: 110
Green, Aaron G.: 89 Noyes, Eliot: 82 Zion k Breen: 42, 43, 101, 106

11
trustees of the museum off modern art

as of October 1986
William S. Paley, Chairman Emeritus; Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd, Chairman of the Board; Mrs. Henry
Ives Cobb, Vice Chairman; David Rockefeller, Vice Chairman; Donald B. Marron, President; Mrs. Frank

Y. Larkin, Vice President; ]ohn Parkinson III, Vice President and Treasurer: Lily Auchincioss; Edward
Larrabee Barnes; Celeste G. Bartos; Sid Richardson Bass; H.R.H. Prinz Franz von Bayern**; Gor-
don Bunshaft; Shirley C. Burden; Thomas S. Carroll*; John B. Carter; Frank T. Cary; Anne Cox
Chambers; Gianluigi Gabetti; Miss Lillian Gish**; Paul Gottlieb; Agnes Gund; Mrs. Melville
Wakeman Hall; George Heard Hamilton*; Barbara Jakobson; Sidney Janis**; Philip Johnson;
Ronald S. Lauder; John L. Loeb*; Ranald H. Macdonald*; Dorothy C. Miller**; J. Irwin Miller*; S. I.

Newhouse, Jr.; Stavros S. Niarchos; Richard E. Oldenburg; Peter G. Peterson; Gifford Phillips; Mme
Jacqueline Picasso**; John Rewald**; David Rockefeller, Jr.; Richard E. Salomon; Mrs. Wolfgang
Schoenborn*; Mrs. Constantine Sidamon-Eristoff; Mrs. Bertram Smith; Jerry I. Speyer; Mrs. Alfred
R. Stern; Mrs. Donald B. Straus; Walter N. Thayer; R. L. B. Tobin; Mrs. Clifton R. Wharton, Jr.;

Monroe Wheeler*; Richard S. Zeisler. Ex Officio Trustees: Edward I. Koch, Mayor of the City of New
York; Harrison J. Goldin, Comptroller of the City of New York.

*Trustee Emeritus **Honorary Trustee

photograph credits

In the preparation of this book we ivere dependent upon existing photographs. Work of great
interest often had to be omitted for lack of convincing illustrations; on the other hand, some of

the included work has been flattered by selective and expert photography. The aim. however,
was less a compilation of "bests" than a bringing together of provocative pictures. To the pho-

togiaphers, professional and amateur, go my warm thanks.

E. B. K.
Peter Aaron/ESTO: 98 top; Charles Agle: 28 top; Marinus Andersen: 47; Architectural Forum:
24 plan; Morley Baer: 42 bottom, 44, 69; Berko: 36 bottom, 56; Ernie Braun: 52 top; Hugo Bryan,
courtesy USDA Soil Conservation Service: 14; Chicago Park District: 72, 73 left; Gerry Campbell/
SWA Group: 107 top; John Cliett Dia Art Foundation 1980: 97; Connecticut General Life
Insurance Co.: 75 bottom; Country Life: 9 right, 10 right, 55; Creative Photo Service: 109 bot-
tom; Richard Cripps: 46; Sylvia Crowe's Garden Design: 30; Dandelet: 89; Dell & Wainwright:
84 bottom; Domus: 60-61; Nicolau Drei: 92; Charles Eames: 53 bottom. 87; Carl Feiss: 88-89;

Roy Flamm: 24, 25; Freer Gallery, courtesy National Palace & Central Museums, Taichung,
Taiwan: II; Marcel Gautherot: 37, 48, 62, 66, 67; Alexandre Georges: 58, 106 top; Gosta
Glase: 19, 40 top; Heikki Havas: 85; Hedrich-Blessing: 90, 91; Lucicn Herve 23, 32 right, 81;
David Hirsch: 99 bottom; George Holton: 27; Susan Jellicoe: 78; Henrique Mindlin's Modern
Architecture in Brazil: 67 plan; Molitor: 64; Moulin Studios: 45; Nelson Gallery: 9 left; Jo.seph

Nettis: 39 right; New York State Department of Public Works: 86 top; Paul Oreby: 31 bottom;

Richard Payne: 106 bottom; Photochrome Ltd.: 10 left; George Pohl: 41; Armando Salas Portugal:
33, 34, 35, 50, 65, 70, 71, 86 bottom; Stephen Proehl: 103 top; Retoria/Yukio Futagawa: 110

bottom; Paul Ryan: 104; Tatsuzo Sato: 4 bottom; P. C. Scheier: 16; George Silk, courtesy Life

Magazine 1963 Time Inc.: 82 top; G. E. Kidder Smith: 28 bottom, 31 top, 77 bottom; Ezra
Stoller: 20, 68 right, 73 right, 74, 75 top, 83, 93, 100 left; Stewart's: 54; Gene Stutz: 57 bottom;
Swedish Tourist Traffic Association: 36 top, 76 left, 77 top, 79; Soichi Sunami: 59; Lou de la

Torre: 95; UIA International Architect: 99 top; Anthony Walmsley: 53 top, 63; Lawrence S.

Williams, Inc.: 39 left; Catherine Wurster: 12 right; Italo Zannier: 110 top; Zion &: Breen: 101.

COLOR PHOTOGRAPHY. Marccl Gauthcrot: between 48-49; Armando Salas Portugal: front cover, be-
tween 32-33, between 79-80 (bottom); Retoria/Yukio Futagawa: back cover; Julius Shulman:
between 64-65; Ezra Stoller: between 79-80 (top).

112
 In this classic book, now newly expanded, Elizabeth B. Kassler continues to give us
what Katharine S. White, writing in The New Yorker, called "some of the wisest
thoughts. .on landscaping and gardening and on
. how the aesthetics and pressures
of our time have affected the modern landscape artist." A new section of works
designed after the book's original publication in 1964 shows how attitudes are
changing since we have come to realize, over these two decades, that man is not this
planet's lord, but a rude guest dangerously out of joint with his natural environ-
ment. Rather than reflecting this alienation or concocting meaningless formalities,
a sensitive landscape designer can, Mrs. Kassler writes, "make the nature of nature
accessible to our awareness and to our sense of livelv participation."

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