Return of the Prodigal
"Why don't you go on west to California?" said the "owner men" in John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath: "There's work there and it never gets cold. Why, you can reach out anywhere and pick an orange. Why there's always some kind of crop to work in. Why don't you go there?"[64]
Like the Joad family, Garrett Eckbo was lured back to California not only by nostalgia but also by the promise of a job—in the Farm Security Administration (FSA ) office in San Francisco. When Eckbo arrived late in 1938, however, the position had evaporated. He sought work from Thomas Church and was taken on immediately. Their association as employer and employee did not last long—two
weeks to be exact. At that time, the FSA job rose again with the promise of slightly greater pay. Eckbo asked Church to match the FSA offer; Church declined, and Eckbo entered the ranks of government functionaries. Filled with advanced landscape design ideas, social ideals, and a considerable population of migrant farmworkers for which to design, the recent graduate joined a talented team of designers working in the FSA 's western office.[65]
Regionalism, with the reexamination of the locale, was a theme underlying many New Deal programs, from the Federal Writer's Project to local art programs. Regionalism asserted the knowledge and experience of a particular place over a broader idea of the nation as a whole, expressing "the need for a sense of place amid the stress and dislocation of the depression." For an agricultural society in turmoil, with hundreds of thousands of displaced nomads forced to wander on western roads, the idea of soil, roots, and home became a preoccupation. "This land, this red land, is us," wrote John Steinbeck, "and the flood years and the dust years and the drought years are us." In the flight that followed dispossession, farmers dreamed of the land from which they had been driven: "How'll it be not to know what land's outside the door? How if you wake up in the night and know—and know the willow tree's not there? Can you live without the willow tree? Well no, you can't."[66]
The regard for things regional exerted an essentially conservative—in its literal sense—influence upon art and design, denying continental avant-garde imports for themes validating what were believed to be distinctively American concepts. The reconstruction of Williamsburg, the elevation of Mt. Vernon to the status of shrine, and the FSA photographic project reveal common origins in the search for heritage. It was an urge that also found expressions in landscape design and buildings that evoked the perceived stability of prior eras, such as the structures based on local historical prototypes built by the National Park Service.
Throughout the country, projects for parks and recreational facilities, rose gardens and campgrounds challenged landscape designers to maximize the impact of minimal means and the often unskilled labor force of the Civilian Conservation Corps. The designs tended to reflect regional themes grounded in sentiment. Park and Recreation
Structures , a three-volume handbook written by Albert H. Good and published by the National Park Service in 1938, represented the best of local and federal governmental sponsored work, from signing and water fountains to lodges and trailer camps. It became the standard reference work for decades. In the foreword to the first volume Arno Cammerer, director of the National Park Service, established the prerogatives for park design:
A basic objective of those who are entrusted with development of such areas [modifications of the natural landscape] for human uses for which they are established is, it seems to me, to hold these modifications to a minimum and so design them that, besides being attractive to look upon, they appear to belong to and be a part of their settings .[67]
Although this statement could be interpreted and utilized by an architect such as Frank Lloyd Wright to produce Taliesin West, for the most part the illustrations and message of the books argued for a traditional expression drawing upon indigenous architecture and materials. "More than any other regional issue," wrote Michael Steiner, "sense of place offered a promise of order, security and self-understanding."[68] Eckbo never denied the importance of these longings, but he did not readily accept the assumed prescription of a regional or traditional expression for them so common to the National Park Service.
Among its assignments, the western office of the Farm Security Administration was charged with providing minimal living conditions for agricultural workers, both migrant and more sedentary, focused on California, Arizona, and Texas. To meet the constantly increasing demands for housing, the authority's designers created a series of camps, many of them in California's Central Valley, that used almost every available form of housing stock. The solutions ranged from tents to trailers to metal sheds; none of them fancy, all of them minimal. These were all standardized units—despised by the program's architects—and the contributions of the FSA designers were primarily in the planning of the communities and in the humanization of exterior spaces against the harsh climates of the arid land.
Eckbo worked on the design of almost fifty camps during his four-odd
28
Park and community building. Harlingen, Texas, 1940. Farm Security Administration. Ink on tracing paper.
[Documents Collection ]
years with the administration, relying on a relatively stable approach to layout and landscape. While many projects, such as the Taft or Shafter camps, used a hexagonal or modified hexagonal arrangement, some schemes were less formal and developed more directly from local site conditions. The designers planned an architectural ecology of sorts, in which platform tents or trailers would be succeeded by more permanent metal housing, probably of little actual improvement given its poor insulative qualities. Finally, apartment blocks or detached houses might be built [see plate II].
In these projects, as in most of his community landscape designs, rows of trees or hedges reduced the velocity of winds and provided shade; their linear alignments or sinuous curves unified the spaces surrounding individual structures, in effect creating a landscape super-structure to which the minimal buildings were subservient. Plant lists were surprisingly varied, with most of the trees brought to the site, others transplanted within the same site or from other proximate FSA projects. These included cottonwood, Chinese elm, sycamore, mulberry, and other hardy species.
The highlights of the landscape schemes were the park or community areas in which the group spaces of laundry structures, meeting rooms, or playgrounds were extended outward [figure 28]. In Landscape for Living , Eckbo presented twelve variants for the same park space for the camp near Weslaco, Texas, demonstrating how to create genetically affiliated spatial designs using a simplified—yet consistent—vocabulary [see figures 98, 99]. All these areas were intended to be irrigated and kept green. Water resources were usually available because the camps occupied sites previously used as farms or ranches. In some instances, the grand ideas—both social and vegetal—languished with lack of maintenance. Dorothea Lange's photographic documentation made the limits of the FSA 's interventions only too clear, discussed by Dorothée Imbert in the following essay.[69]
In retrospect, the success of the FSA projects might be qualified, but rarely the idealism of their enterprise. Housing by Burton Cairns and Vernon DeMars at Chandler, Arizona, and Yuba City were among the earliest social housing in the United States, cited and published widely. The landscape ideas that complemented these projects—led
by Garrett Eckbo and his classmates Corwin Mocine and Francis Violich—matched in energy and zeitgeist the most advanced of architectural ideas. In almost all of these landscape designs, the spatial ideas found in Modernist architectural space were applied to desiccated landscapes or agricultural fields. Versions of Eckbo's Contempoville were realized up and down the length of California, reduced to an almost pathetic level of means, but with no reduction in the intensity of their spatial investigation or humanity.
During his employment with the FSA , Eckbo moonlighted on private commissions and took an active part in the discussion of relevant professional and social issues. Telesis, an informal alliance of design practitioners based in San Francisco, was formed to address the problems facing the environment of the Bay Area. The first meeting was held in the Eckbo house on Telegraph Hill in 1939, with a core group that included architects Burton Cairns, Vernon DeMars, and Phillip Joseph; planner T. J. Kent; landscape architects Francis Violich and Corwin Mocine (who would become planners); and industrial designer Walter Landor, among others. In July 1940 the group held an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art, arguing for comprehensive planning, the joining of social, political, and physical planning concerns, and an integration of the design professions in outlook and collaboration. Although Eckbo served as editor of a West Coast issue of Task in late 1944, the group's cohesion—if not its idealism—had been seriously undermined by the demands of war, at home and in battle.[70]
With the American entry into World War II, the FSA agency turned its attention to defense workers' housing for their constantly growing numbers in the San Francisco Bay Area and central California. Of the existing government agencies, only the FSA held a positive track record for producing housing and community facilities, on time and more or less on budget: "Neither [the United States Housing Authority nor the Public Buildings Administration] was very effective, and by the spring of 1941 the housing program was the furthest behind schedule of all defense building efforts."[71] The result was the FSA 's undertaking of defense workers' housing and the formation of the Division of Defense Housing to meet the ever-growing population surges into California.