Epilogue

In 1963 Garrett Eckbo returned to Berkeley as the chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture. This return, he recalls, was bittersweet: sweet in his increased involvement with teaching energetic young student minds, and slightly bitter in having to leave both active practice and southern California. But conditions there had changed: the office was evolving into Eckbo Dean Austin Williams (EDAW ), a behemoth of the landscape profession.^[107]

But society and the practice of landscape architecture as a whole were also changing. The prosperity and optimism of the immediate postwar era had been transformed into the affluence and social questioning of the 1960s; and then the worldwide civil unrest of 1968. The malevolent products of our ruthless attitude toward the earth were becoming more clear, as agricultural land was churned into suburbia, and water and air quality plummeted. The concern for the planet as a whole, and for the application of a sane ecology, influenced the course of landscape design and enticed it away from the garden. A generation of landscape architects, steeped in the ecological and analytical methods developed by lan McHarg, retreated from thinking of landscape design as the making of space and form and places in which people live.^[108] Nature again was ranked over humanity.

Today, at almost 86, Garrett Eckbo continues to study, think, write, and answer the bothersome questions of nagging would-be biographers. The trail he has blazed through the modern landscape has been both broad and deep, and it leaves a vast field of ideas and designs to be mined by future generations. Indeed, "followers [of Eckbo] have made whole careers out of fragments of his ideas," said landscape architect and professor Laurie Olin, adding: "EDAW has built an empire out of his idea of the corporate practice of interdisciplinary design." But Eckbo remains calm—at least on the surface

—before this adulation, noting that "I wasn't ever aggressive. . . . Quietly stubborn, maybe. I just did what I wanted to do without arguing."^[109] Perhaps this personal evaluation is just a tad too self-effacing. As landscape architect and as author, Garrett Eckbo has been polemical—softly polemical, perhaps, but polemical all the same.

If there is an Eckbo legacy, it tells us that comprehensive considerations, with a stress on the analytical stage of design, do not excuse ugly and unworkable places, whether indoors or out. The garden, the park, the promenade are far more than a few trees for shade and a shelter for eating. Landscape architecture is at root the vehicle by which we improve the relations between people and nature. It is a profession, certainly; it is a discipline, undeniably; and ultimately it is an art, a social art: the social art of landscape design.