A Publication of the Foundation for Landscape Studies A Journal of Place Volume vıı | Number ıı | Spring 2012 Essays: Landscapes of the Pacific Northwest and Coastal California 3 Laurie Olin: Oyster Light: Pacific Northwest Reflections Thaisa Way: Richard Haag: New Eyes for Old Susan Herrington: Cornelia Hahn Oberlander: Canada’s Modern Landscape Architect Kathleen John-Alder: California Dreaming Place Maker 15 Susan Chamberlin: Isabelle Greene Book Reviews 17 Reuben M. Rainey: La Natura come amante: Nature as a Lover; Richard Haag Associates By Luca Maria Francesco Fabris Linda Parshall: The Fortune Hunter: A German Prince in Regency England By Peter James Bowman Elihu Rubin: Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes By Louise A. Mozingo Contributors 23 Letter from the Editor Ranch in northern California. This issue’s Place Maker compliments from readers enterprise, we strongly urge The emphasis on site and is landscape architect who appreciate the quality of you to enclose a check or scenery at this modernist Isabelle Greene, who has the writing and graphic provide your credit-card planned development result- centered her distinguished design as well as the subjects information on the envelope his issue of ter she pays particular atten- ed in what would be called career mainly in and around treated in Site/Lines. We are that is inserted in this issue. Site/Lines has as its tion to his two best-known today an environmentally Santa Barbara, California. In proud that this publication Donors of $150 and over thematic focus and most innovative and friendly design. Al Boeke, an focusing on the garden appears to occupy a previ- will receive a personally coastal California influential landscapes, Gas apostle of California mod- Greene designed for Carol ously unfilled niche in the inscribed copy of my recent- and the Pacific Works Park and Bloedel ernism and New Town Valentine in Montecito, realm of landscape periodi- ly published book Writing TNorthwest. In writing about Reserve. design principles, represent- Susan Chamberlin makes the cals and that several libraries the Garden, A Literary Conver- the latter, the eminent land- Susan Herrington treats ed the developer, Oceanic reader aware of how this have requested complete sation Over Two Centuries. scape architect Laurie Olin, the work of another pioneer- Properties. His hiring of pio- designer’s knowledge of sets. Although you may In anticipation of your gift who is a native of this ing landscape modernist, neering landscape architect botany enabled her to employ access current and back of any amount, we thank you region, eloquently captures Cornelia Hahn Oberlander. Lawrence Halprin to collab- the region’s xeric vegetation issues electronically on our for helping us to continue its meaning as place in a Based in Vancouver, orate with architects Joseph to achieve the same kind of Web site, we think that read- fulfilling this essential part series of personal medita- Oberlander’s long and dis- Esherick, Charles Moore, and strongly patterned ground ing Site/Lines in its paper of our mission. tions based on memory. tinguished career over the William Turnbull resulted in plane with contrasting colors form is still a preference Olin’s lifelong practice of past sixty years has included a plan for a community of and boldly delineated shapes among many of our readers. With good green wishes, recording his impressions of several commissions in col- sensitively sited second that Brazilian modernist However, we must face the landscape in sketchbooks laboration with notable homes built in the Bay Area Roberto Burle Marx demon- fact that funding for this demonstrates his method of modern architects in Canada style. John-Alder’s essay strated using tropical plants. option falls short of cost. grounding design in an and the United States. As a examines how the initial Here, as in Greene’s other Since the publication of understanding of the under- woman in what was still a design’s compatibility with work, the design simplicity Site/Lines is a donor-support- Elizabeth Barlow Rogers lying patterns of nature. man’s field when she entered the environment has been she derived from the Zen ed rather than a subscription President, As a student in the the Harvard Graduate compromised over time. aesthetic of Japanese gardens Foundation for Landscape School of Architecture at the School of Design in 1943, can also be seen. Studies University of Washington Oberlander, who had been The Foundation for Land- and later while working in influenced by Bauhaus scape Studies is gratified the office of Richard Haag, design theory in her native to have received numerous Olin was influenced by the Germany, asserted her inde- design theories and practice pendence from Harvard’s of this preeminent landscape then-prevailing Beaux-Arts architect. Thaisa Way, who curriculum. Herrington dis- now teaches landscape archi- cusses how in doing so she 2012 John Brinckerhoff 2012 David R. Coffin tecture at Olin’s alma mater, was able to forge a personal Jackson Book Prize Winners Publication Grant Winners the University of Washing- style compatible with the ton, is currently exploring modern architecture move- David Coke and Alan Borg Bianca Maria Rinaldi Elizabeth Hope Cushing Emily Pugh Haag’s development of mod- ment, which was still in its Vauxhall Gardens The Chinese Garden: Garden Arthur A. Schurcliff (1870-1957) Architecture and the Cold War: ernist landscape principles infancy in the United States. Yale University Press, 2011 Types for Contemporary and the Road to Colonial The Berlin Wall and the as a personal design idiom. Kathleen John-Alder, a Landscape Architecture Williamsburg Construction of East and Lawrence Halprin, with fore- In her insightful essay on former associate partner at Birkhäuser, 2011 West Berlin word by Laurie Olin Alison Hirsch this twentieth-century mas- Olin Partnership and now A Life Spent Changing Places Kirk Savage City Choreographer: Lawrence William Tronzo an assistant professor in the University of Pennsylvania Monument Wars: Washington, Halprin and Public Performance Petrarch’s Two Gardens Department of Landscape Press, 2011 D.C., the National Mall, in Urban Renewal America On the Cover: Suzanne L. Turner Architecture at Rutgers and the Transformation of the Sauk River Farm on steelhead fish- Eugenia W. Herbert Karen M’Closkey The Garden Diary of Martha University, looks at the Sea Memorial Landscape ing trip near the Cascade Flora’s Empire: British Gardens Unearthed: The Landscapes of Turnbull, Mistress of Rosedown University of California Press, Mountains, Washington, 1967. in India Hargreaves Associates Plantation 2011 Drawing by Laurie Olin. University of Pennsylvania 2 Press, 2011 Landscapes of the Pacific Northwest and Coastal California Oyster Light: Pacific Northwest Reflections Since that time I have filled ’m a landscape architect who loves to draw. I have been nearly one hundred fifty drawing ever since I was a child in Alaska, where I grew up. sketchbooks, but probably When I was young, I learned about art from books – there none have had more to do were no galleries or art museums up north at that time – with who I became – a land- and I learned about the environment directly from one of scape architect who has Ithe last truly “natural” places on earth. People often ask me spent his career bringing how someone from Alaska happened to end up in landscape nature and landscape to architecture, something I have wondered myself from time to cities and people – than time. I had certainly never heard of it in Fairbanks in the those I filled in my early 1940s and 1950s. I started college in civil engineering, which years in Alaska and was one of the more intellectual and creative things a person Washington. To draw one could do on the frontier. After a year at the University of has to be quiet and sit still Alaska, I shifted to architecture – something that seemed, if and look very carefully. If only vaguely, more artistic – and came “Outside,” as we called you do, things will reveal leaving Alaska, to study at the University of Washington in themselves. The world will Seattle. This led to the beginning of my professional life in the open and unfold. city and on the islands of Puget Sound. While my teachers were a great influence upon me – espe- There are many stunning cially the landscape architect Richard Haag, for whom several natural places in the Pacific of my classmates and I worked off and on between 1958 and Northwest: the snow-clad 1970 – it was the landscape of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest volcanic mountains, the that nourished and shaped my sensibility; that made me real- green realm of the rain ize that designing buildings was not enough for me. I was forests, and the Columbia taken by space, by natural processes, by ecology, by the life of River canyons and gorge. Of the landscape and its creatures. all the natural features of the Driftwood on beach, Agate Point, these evocative places has its own shape, rocks, waves, and Looking back, I see that I have always been curious and that Northwest, however, the Bainbridge Island, Washington, birds; its own moods, personality, and weather. I have always tried to capture my discoveries on paper. When I most beautiful and stimulat- 1969. Beaches are ideal places to walk, scavenge, play, and eat. For was eight years old, my family moved to the woods and I ing for me may be the Pacific generations people have built shelters in the sand from the began exploring my environment on foot. By the time I was Ocean beaches with their receding cliffs, stranded rocks and logs, driftwood, and battered materials that wash up on the sixteen, I found pleasure in sitting about in the landscape stacks, and vast jumbles of logs and wreckage.