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Ground Work

For almost six decades Eckbo gave form to our social landscape. He continuously framed his theories and social ideals within the search for a modern idiom, establishing a perpetual dialogue among people, nature, and aesthetics. With his Harvard fellows Dan Kiley and James Rose, Eckbo published articles that stressed the necessity for a revised approach to landscape design, whether for an urban, rural, or primeval situation. Echoing Christopher Tunnard, the triumvirate of modernist graduate students argued for the application of science to the field of landscape design and for the use of vegetation sculpturally, if not structurally. As if to announce Tunnard's 1942 claim that the "right style for the twentieth century is no style at all, but a new conception of planning the human environment," Eckbo repeatedly stated the irrelevance of style to landscape design.[3] Instead of deepening the schism between formal and informal styles, he asserted, one should seek a dual understanding of biology and geometry. Abandoning the classical references of his early student investigations, such as An Estate in the Manner of Louis XIV designed while at Berkeley [see figure 2], Eckbo's Harvard projects veered decisively toward modernism. The 1937 Freeform Park was a "Memorial to the Fathers of our Country" situated on Potomac Island, where the informal became modern, and the modern went informal [see figures 10–11; plate I]. If the circulation and general geometries of Freeform Park still retained a traditional structure reminiscent of Fletcher


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Flexible Co-op (project). Circa 1945. The adjustable screens facilitated the transformation
of private space into public.
[Documents Collection ]


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Steele's classical modernity, two of Eckbo's later student projects clearly departed from such references.

For the 1937 Small Gardens in the City, Eckbo shaped the backyards of an entire urban block [see figures 21, 22a-d]. Although he designed most of the gardens as individual entities, the play of partition walls affecting two neighboring lots announced his future explorations in site planning. The postwar Flexible Co-op project, for instance, structured the garden in gradients of privacy: as one moved away from the house, the space remained private or became semi-public through the manipulation of boundaries—hedges and movable screens [figure 83].

Eckbo's thesis project, Contempoville, also studied the formal variations of individual residential gardens but added a public dimension with a central communal open space [figure 84]. His proposal situated Contempoville in Los Angeles, at the time of a hypothetical 1945 world's fair, which would have "portray[ed] the World of Day-After-Tomorrow [through] an exposition of the most advanced design-thought of the day." To answer the wishes of his client, Eckbo developed a block of model suburban homes composed of twenty-three houses, whose plans he borrowed from contemporary architectural magazines, placed on half-acre lots around a ten-acre park. The park offered "active recreational facilities" for residents of all ages, thereby leaving money and space for a "more pleasing landscape development" of individual lots.[4] The garden plans were extremely varied but consistent in the modernity of their idioms [see figure 23]. Arp-inspired biomorphic shapes, replicas of Legrain's zigzag lawn border [see figure 13], and explosions of angled lines shaped the ground plane. Similarly, enclosing elements and sylvan architecture manipulated the spatial envelope. By alternating translucent and opaque walls, and hedges above and below eye-level, Eckbo confused the sense of boundary and implied a continuation of the dynamically layered space into the depth of the park. A caption read: "Beginning with geometrical lot lines and house forms, shrubs and trees are placed in a consciously ordered arrangement to control the garden space. However, nature will dominate these gardens, because the plant material is so placed that it can continue its growth with a minimum of interference by the hand of man."[5] Such divorcing of the graphic ground plane from the vegetal mass foreshadowed Eckbo's landscape


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Contempoville: A Model Block of Suburban Homes, to be exhibited
at the Los Angeles 1945 World's Fair. Site plan. Thesis project, Harvard University, 1938.
[Documents Collection ]


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85
Contempoville. Central park with shelter (replica of the 1929 Barcelona [German] Pavilion),
outdoor theater, and playgrounds. Plan. Thesis project, Harvard University, 1938.
[Documents Collection ]


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compositions for the migrant camps, as well as his planned communities in southern California, where the volumetrically varied plantings effaced the rigor of their arrangement.

The communal amenities of Contempoville included an outdoor theater, children's playgrounds, tennis court, swimming pool, and its shelter [figure 85]. Centrally placed within the block, these were arranged inside groves of trees and partitions of hedges. For the pool shelter, the landscape architect borrowed Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's 1929 Barcelona Pavilion [see figure 25], which—in Eckbo's own words—had thus "achieved (or descended to) functional community use."[6] If the transformation of this icon of modernist architecture—witnessed in the revision of the reflecting pool into a swimming pool—may seem irreverent to some, the homage to Mies was genuine. Seeking the concept of house-and-garden as an organic unit, Eckbo cited contemporary architecture for what he termed "decentralized building and open space arrangements, in which one can find no façades."[7] He translated Mies's depth-enhancing overlay of architectonic planes into shifting hedges that suggested unbounded space within the scale of the private garden. Although Eckbo later dismissed Contempoville as falling short of being a community—qualifying his student thinking, not in social or planning terms, but exclusively in formal terms—this project held all the promise of his future investigations in site space design and social involvement.[8]

Formally, Mies van der Rohe's dissolving of the architectural envelope would find literal applications in several of the public landscapes Eckbo conceived just after graduation [figure 86]. He spent half of 1938 in Washington, D.C., designing guideline schemes for public housing recreation spaces at the request of Frederick Gutheim (assistant information director, United States Housing Authority).[9] In these theoretical projects, the vocabulary of Contempoville was further developed, as well as simplified. The shifting and overlapping of planes—hedges and screens, benches, pools, and sandboxes—and architectonic rows of trees defined various use areas, whose rigor was softened by the curvilinear wrappings of grassed islands and tree canopies. Plantings were minimal, to reduce maintenance. Untrimmed hedges partially reinforced the edges of the central space and established a link with the tenant yards. These vegetal screens framed the "free play," "quiet," "shelter," or "apparatus" zones. Regulated by allées


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Study for public housing recreation areas. Axonometric drawing and plan.
Designed for the United States Housing Authority. Washington D.C., 1938.
[Courtesy Garrett Eckbo ]


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and bosks (which were "transparent," that is not fully blocking the view), architectural partitions (above and below eye level), and hedges (opaque, blocking the view), the space was varied, yet neither confining nor labyrinthine, and thus offered the ideal terrain for the "active pre-school child."[10]

Although Eckbo came from a modest background and had been exposed by osmosis at Harvard to the social ethos of European modernism—in courses offered by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer—his student years were relatively sheltered from the effects of the depression. Upon his return to the San Francisco Bay Area, however, Eckbo immersed himself in one of the major enterprises of federal relief planning, when he joined the Farm Security Administration (FSA ) in 1939.


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