Contributing writer Ted Cleary, ASLA, of Studio Cleary Landscape Architecture, is back to shed light on the structure behind MCM landscape design that accounts for its unique look:
I’m often asked by MCM enthusiasts which plants are most appropriate for the landscaping around their home. To be sure, certain species bring to mind that midcentury modern look: strongly “architectural” plants whose bold textures like spiky Yucca, big floppy Philodendron or stiffly upright Sansevieria (Mother-in-Law’s Tongue) are associated with the Southern California climate where modernism was embraced. And certainly there are great choices to introduce you to, a subject for another article.
But the fact is, midcentury modern homes were created in diverse locations all across America and the world, with equally diverse plantings suited to whatever their local climate dictates. They would, therefore, be pretty much the same species as those used to landscape their white-columned Neoclassical neighbor up the street. So a “midcentury modern landscape look” isn’t so much a function of which plant species are used, but rather, how they are arranged. In this week’s installment, and in Part II two weeks from now, we’ll delve into that “how”.
You may be at a loss to figure out what that elusive quality is that defines a quintessentially modernist ‘50s- or ‘60s-looking landscape design. As that Supreme Court Justice famously observed about another subject, it may be hard to define but you know it when you see it. This article will help you understand how a certain “vocabulary” of geometries underlied those cool garden designs….and you may be surprised that, contrary to what you see in Dwell magazine, it wasn’t all about 90-degree angles.
Back in the day, the approach of modernist landscape architects — most notably, LAs such as Tommy Church, Garrett Eckbo, Bob Royston, Doug Baylis or Larry Halprin — embraced biomorphic and abstracted shapes every bit as much as the orthogonal, right angle. Sometimes succinctly referred to as “bio-cubism”, the two seemingly disparate styles formed a past niche, each strengthening the other with the spatial experiences they created. To understand where that came from, let’stake a brief look back at early-20th-century history.
“Modernism” is a broad movement that extends well beyond architecture; it actually began to take root as early as the late 1800s, influencing all the intellectual pursuits from literature to philosophy to music. This re-examination of unquestioned norms naturally spread to architecture, where Adolf Loos first provocatively declared in his 1910 book that “ornament is a crime”. But it was in 1929 that Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion introduced the world to the type of modernist architecture we think of today, with its floating, intersecting planes. This International Style, as it came to be called, was simultaneously appearing from other architects like Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler in Los Angeles. (It’s striking when one first sees old black & white photos of Model A Fords parked in front of Neutra’s early buildings, as modern as anything we equate with the 1950s.)
Yet landscape architecture was late to the party. The curriculum at the few university landscape programs was still staunchly rooted in a Beaux Arts tradition, training young LAs to design the sort of European-inspired estates befitting a Rockefeller or Vanderbilt client. The “middle class” did not yet exist in anywhere near the widespread manner we know today, before the prosperous postwar years would bring explosive demand for a new, relaxed style of outdoor living to the masses. Harvard’s landscape architecture program, which had strong ties to the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted (the same pioneering LA most famous for designing New York’s Central Park in the 1850s), especially clung to both the Olmstedian notion of naturalistic, pastoral landscapes and ornate classically-inspired formality. Then, with the appearance of modernist Walter Gropius, who’d emigrated to Harvard from Germany’s Bauhaus under Nazi pressures, that changed. Graduate students Eckbo, along with Dan Kiley and James Rose, arrived there in the late ‘30s and embraced this new thinking about the landscape, coming to be known as “the Harvard Rebels”. They searched everywhere for inspiration for this radical and unprecedented approach to landscape design, until they found it: in the abstract work of painters and sculptors such as Jean Arp, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, and others. One side-by-side comparison perhaps demonstrates this best, where we see Kandinsky’s 1923 painting “Composition VIII” (top-right) articulated in a 1945 Garrett Eckbo garden plan (bottom-right).
To be continued…..
