Introduction to Landscape for Living

INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT EDITION DAVID C. STREATFIELD Landscape for Living was published in 1950 as a in the context of Garrett Eckbo’s early profes- theory of modern landscape design.1 It was di- sional career as a landscape architect, author, and rected to the profession of landscape architecture, committed social activist. The publication of the whose practice had failed to acknowledge the im- book and the professional accomplishments that portant technical, social, and cultural changes of led up to it are remarkable when understood in the the previous hundred years. Clearly expressing the context of Eckbo’s miserable childhood, which transformative possibilities of progressive mod- provided little indication of a life devoted to a con- ernism, it proposed a theory to enact the transfor- suming passion for the landscape. Eckbo was born mation, addressing the future by rejecting stylistic in Cooperstown, New York, in 1910 to Axel and eclecticism and advocating the creative use of Theodora Munn Eckbo. His mother came from a technology and science. The book’s appearance co- fairly well-to-do family and had graduated from incided with a time of buoyant postwar optimism Vassar, but his gentle Norwegian father proved to and the emergence of California as an important be totally ineffective in the competitive world of economic region that pioneered modernist forms American business. He lost all of his wife’s money of living.2 Garrett Eckbo was then forty years old, in a series of business failures, and the couple soon and in the short space of seventeen years he had divorced. Eckbo’s mother moved with her son to achieved an enviable and unmatched national and Oakland, California, and then to Alameda, a small international reputation.3 Landscape for Living middle-class town of single-family houses on an is- is a synthesis of ideas Eckbo had previously de- land in San Francisco Bay, just north of Oakland. veloped, beginning in the mid-1930s, in journal Dire financial circumstances forced her to take articles, interdisciplinary and intraprofessional menial jobs to support the family, which eventu- discussions, and the professional work of a New ally included her own mother.5 Deal–era federal agency and a busy private office. Eckbo grew up unmotivated and lonely, a poor The book was well received and quickly became boy without friends. “I’ve always had the feeling acknowledged as the leading text of American that I grew up on the outside looking in,” he later landscape modernism, supplanting Henry Vincent remarked. He explored the beaches and creeks of Hubbard and Theodora Kimball’s Introduction to Alameda, poling on a homemade raft, and devel- the Study of Landscape Design (1917).4 oped a “wanderoo,” a long walk on the beach, This introduction places Landscape for Living which he later mapped.6 Understandably, he felt xi that his future held no opportunities, and he had preciate and solve the problems in landscape de- no sense of what direction his life would take. He sign peculiar to this coast.”9 The most influential held a series of routine jobs following his gradua- member of the small faculty was H. L. “Punk” tion from high school, but in 1929 an invitation Vaughan, a relatively recent graduate of Ohio from his wealthy uncle, Eivind Eckbo, a lawyer, to State University who had been persuaded by his visit him in Norway “changed my whole life as far teacher and friend, Thomas D. Church, to come as giving me a sense of ambition and wanting to do out to the Bay Area. This “breath of fresh air” en- something.”7 For six months he was a welcome couraged his students to keep open minds and young guest in his uncle’s large house overlooking form their own opinions.10 His approach to design Oslo, with servants, a Rolls-Royce in the garage, emphasized clear thinking and economy, histori- and ponies grazing in a paddock. His uncle cal precedents being used not as the source of sty- presided as a benevolent patriarch over his cul- listic forms but rather as design prototypes tured family, providing positive guidance, which reflecting time, place, and people. he also gave to his impoverished nephew. The uninspired but essentially open and un- Eckbo was deeply homesick, however, and re- dogmatic curriculum espoused a pragmatic ver- turned to Alameda in the depth of the Depres- sion of the Beaux-Arts system in response to the sion, but with a newfound ambition to attend changed circumstances of the Depression. De- college. His grades were insufficient for entry into signed to equip students with useful professional the University of California in nearby Berkeley, so skills, it comprised three years of design studios, after working at two jobs to earn money he en- two years of courses on plants, one year each of rolled in Marin Junior College. Before entering construction and the history of landscape archi- Berkeley in 1932, he worked in a San Francisco de- tecture, and a summer-long field study course.11 partment store, where he met Francis Violich, who Studio projects might include gardens or small advised him to choose landscape architecture as parks. Eckbo’s Snyder garden is a typical design. A his major owing to his artistic inclinations and love small informal entry lawn precedes a more formal of gardening.8 entrance terrace treated like a room. The rear The small Division of Landscape Architecture lawn, defined by an asymmetrical arrangement of in the College of Agriculture at Berkeley was trees, attempts to evoke a sense of depth in a small founded in 1913 with the understanding “that space (fig. I.1). men trained in California are better able to ap- Eckbo was very interested in history at Berke- I.1. Snyder garden, 1935. Student project, University of California, Berkeley. EDA, Berkeley. xii ley; he later recalled, “I probably memorized all California.16 Instead, Eckbo and Corwin Mocine, the Italian gardens—it wasn’t so easy to memorize one of his classmates, apparently organized their the French.”12 In his large lecture notebook he ini- own field trips to selected estates on the San Fran- tiated a lengthy critique of the English landscape cisco peninsula. His notebook contains lively and school by describing Lancelot “Capability” Brown critical analyses of the spatial and visual charac- as a representative of “this destructive natural ter of these gardens. He commented on one area school” and “Sir Humphrey [sic] Repton” as “just that “this formal garden may be criticized for as bad as Brown.”13 As much as anything, these being more formal than the area immediately dismissals probably reflect his belief that designs about the house thus breaking a rule that a devel- in the English landscape style were inappropriate opment should go through less formal to infor- for California. mal,” but added that “there are no rules in He described his beautifully graded sepia-wash design.”17 The Newhall estate, designed by Lewis rendering of the design of “An Estate in the Man- Hobart, evidently appealed to him with its single ner of Louis XIV” (1934) as “a very good French axis of “tremendous grandeur and dignity and ex- Renaissance plan” and the best of his student treme simplicity.”18 The garden tour also rein- schemes (fig. I.2).14 Scholars have interpreted this forced the idea that the dichotomy between formal design, with its radial system of vistas, as typical and informal or natural landscape designs was spe- of the insistence of the Beaux-Arts school on cious and that these design modes could coexist. using historic precedents,15 but it can also be Far from revealing a distaste for designs derived viewed as a prescient foreshadowing of Eckbo’s ar- from historic precedents, his comments reveal a dent belief in the necessity of planning and de- lively and critical understanding of the appropri- signing entire landscapes, a goal whose importance ate adaptation of historically derived schemes to he emphasized consistently throughout his sub- the semiarid California landscape. sequent career. Once the stylistic trappings are After graduation Eckbo worked for a year at the discarded, it can be read as a comprehensively Armstrong Nursery in Ontario, California, in the designed and planned landscape. hot, dry Pomona Valley.19 This nursery, with ex- Eckbo did not enroll in the summer field tensive growing grounds and a display garden, was course, most likely for economic reasons, as it re- noted for its roses and fruit trees. Like many other quired visiting a large number designed land- large nurseries in Southern California, it had main- scapes, including estates in different parts of tained a design department since the 1920s to meet I.2. “An Estate in the Manner of Louis XIV.” Student project, University of California, Berkeley. EDA, Berkeley. xiii the demands of both large estates and smaller subdivision gardens.20 There Eckbo worked under Jay Gooch, producing, with the help of a draftsman, designs based on graph-paper surveys and small snapshots. Such plans cost ten dollars, refunded if the client subse- quently spent more than a hundred dollars on plants.21 He designed over a hundred gardens, which he recalled as being competent and sometimes experimental but rarely inspired. Surviving designs are sim- ilar to those he created at Berkeley, with a bolder interweaving of sim- ple geometries and plants—espe- cially a greater use of trees—that reflects his understanding of the dictates of a different climate. This is exemplified in a design unidenti- fied by site or client in which Eckbo combined the bold thrust of a semicircular path with a looser I.3.

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