Graduate Study

After less than a year of work, Eckbo could see that the horizons at the nursery were limited. The schemes were becoming "rote," and Eckbo was restless to expand his vision of landscape.^[20] An opportunity for graduate study came his way by a scholarship competition sponsored by the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He entered the competition; he was successful. The winning design for a country estate on an island eschewed rigorous French or Italian formality, substituting instead a structured but less geometric development of the site [figure 8]. In the manner of Olmsted, or later

Fletcher Steele, the house was sited at the northern terminus of a broad lawn that linked the residence to the water. This greensward was leveled in the central area for "games" and gently bowed to exaggerate the sense of perspective from the shore up to the house. In the manner of the Italian Renaissance bosco selvatico , the wooded surroundings comforted a "casino" and outlook terrace; a more defined grassed swath opened eastward from the dining room, presumably for leisurely morning meals taken outdoors.

Eckbo acknowledges today that the design was "a fairly prosaic plan. There are probably twelve thousand gardens like this throughout the eastern part of the country. It has that kind of symmetrical informality that was begun at Mt. Vernon, which was the colonial period's contribution to ongoing design ideas."^[21] But as a whole, the design was thoughtful and resolved. While the small sketches successfully illustrated the various architectural events on the island, neither the scheme nor its ink and watercolor rendering could match the brilliance of Eckbo's Beaux-Arts counterparts in France. But the entry was awarded first prize and secured for Eckbo a scholarship for further studies in landscape architecture. With his friend Francis Violich, Eckbo headed east, optimistic about the prospects of Ivy League education despite the lingering effects of the depression.

After a year at Harvard, and summer work in the Boston area, Eckbo traveled to New York to visit—and marry—Arline Williams [figure 9], the sister of his Berkeley classmate and future partner, Edward Williams.^[22] During his first year of study, the graduate student found the curriculum superficially similar to that at Berkeley, and yet more rigidly entrenched. Henry Vincent Hubbard reigned as the theoretical head of the department, and the Beaux-Arts method formed the crux of his approach to design. The 1936 Harvard University Register defined landscape architecture as "primarily a fine art, which aims to create and preserve beauty in the efficient adaptation of land to human use."^[23] Hubbard and Theodora Kimball's Introduction to the Study of Landscape Design codified this vision of landscape architecture and was regarded with near-reverence:

A work of art which has style may be esthetically organized in either of one of two fundamentally different ways. The artist may design his work to express his own ideas, to serve his own uses, to show his control over some of the materials and forces of

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9
Arline Williams. Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1938.
[Courtesy Arline Eckbo ]

nature. Or on the other hand he may design his work to express to the beholders the understanding which he has of some modes of nature's organization, and the pleasure he finds in them. In the first case, the esthetic success of the work will require that the hand and the will of man be visible in it; in the second case, the higher art would be that which so perfectly interpreted nature's character that the work should seem to be a wonderfully complete and intelligible expression of nature's self .^[24]

As Eckbo remembers his Harvard education, its central issue was the designer's visibility, usually expressed as the difference between the informal and formal garden traditions. Most problems, he claims, were stated in terms of that very broad dichotomy. And in his writings, Eckbo hammered away at the false distinction between the formal and informal modes while—ironically—dividing the world's garden traditions into exactly those two categories. To him the particular style in which a landscape was executed mattered less than the intention behind that vocabulary—which should not be a question of style alone. In 1941, some three years after he received his master's degree, he wrote:

The formal garden forces architecture upon the landscape; the informal garden forces the landscape upon architecture. Neither does anything toward the basic problem of garden design: the integration and harmonization of the structural geometry of man with the biological growth and freedom of nature. This can't be done by holding them apart and calling one formal and the other informal. The fundamental fallacy seems to be that a choice between the two extremes is necessary. The argument has been to take either biology or geometry; why not biology plus geometry?^[25]

Eckbo's telling of the story was based on a useful form of simplification. In fact, as Reuben Rainey demonstrates, the Beaux-Arts approach was more subtle than the modernists made it. Rarely was any project entirely formal or entirely informal; almost always the rigidity of any scheme would need be softened by the particularities of the site and program.^[26] While perhaps propelled to a greater degree by a geometric structure, the formality of the garden scheme was tempered and enriched by climate, plant materials, and the client.

Like any theoretical stance, this method was never as fixed as its opponents believed it to be; the presentation of the Beaux-Arts beliefs by Hubbard and Kimball was intelligent, comprehensive, and accepting of infinite manipulation and variation. To the graduate student, it didn't seem that way at the time. Eckbo's own copy of Hubbard and Kimball is filled with argumentative marginal notes that spoke back to the authority represented by the text.^[27] While transparently the churlish cartooning of a prior era by the hand of its successor, these jottings reveal just how seriously Eckbo took his education, and how seriously he set the course for a modern landscape architecture.

However one may qualify Eckbo's caricatured retelling of his days at Harvard, there is no question that landscape pedagogy lagged well behind that of the architecture program. Joseph Hudnut had become the dean of the newly formed Graduate School of Design in 1935, bringing with him ideas about modernism and a renovated curriculum. "Our exigent problem is that of our place in the world," Hudnut wrote. "If indeed architecture can exist amidst airplanes, dynamos and motion pictures, it must seek a reconciliation with them, discovering a new grace and order in the very heart of contemporary technical processes."^[28] Under Hudnut's invitation, the former Bauhaus director Walter Gropius came to Harvard in 1937 and, with Marcel Breuer, injected forefront European ideas about architecture and its social role into an American context. This connection, more than any issue of style, is what Eckbo would carry away from his courses in the architecture department: the link between society and what he would later term "spatial design." While landscape design embraces "surfacing, enclosure, enrichment," a designer strives to "give the richest, most plastic and satisfying form to the space which is being organized; the other is to concentrate always on that space as an arena, volume background, and shelter for human life and activity."^[29]

For Gropius, "the term 'design' broadly embraces the whole orbit of man-made, visible surroundings, from simple everyday goods to the complex pattern of the whole town." Critics had questioned, with good reason, the Modernist project's efficacy in designing cities. Tellingly, there was no instruction in landscape architecture at the

Bauhaus. Eckbo's concern for art and science paralleled those advanced by Gropius and other architects who saw the need for creatively addressing new materials, standardization, and rationalized fabrication. "Good planning," wrote Gropius, "I conceive to be both a science and an art. As a science, it analyzes human relationships; as an art, it co-ordinates human activities into a cultural thesis."^[30] This last sentence alone could have served as the basis for Eckbo's forthcoming master's thesis project.

In addition to the other European émigrés, Hudnut also invited the Canadian-English landscape architect Christopher Tunnard to teach at the Graduate School of Design. In 1934, recently graduated from the Royal Horticultural Society school at Wisley and the Westminster Technical Institute, he began to publish a series of articles in the journal of the Landscape Institute, and later the Architectural Review . Tunnard sought not only a modern manner for landscape design, but more profoundly, an approach that would avoid questions of style altogether. He, too, acknowledged that landscape history had fallen into considerations of formal and informal, but he found in Japan the "empathetic" manner by which a concern for the social and ecological landscape could transcend the very question of style: "This conception of Nature and natural forms finds one of its expressions in Japan (and it is beginning to in Europe) in the unity of the habitation with its environment."^[31] Tunnard's essays ranged in subject matter from investigations into British landscape history to the use of sculpture in gardens, and were collected and published in 1938 as Gardens in the Modern Landscape . The tract would remain the sole English-language polemic for landscape modernism until the publication of Eckbo's own (and more comprehensive) Landscape for Living in 1950.

That Tunnard sought to draw landscape design into tandem with architecture and other modern arts underscored his belief that landscape architecture must be a social art as well as a social science. While the implicit argument for an expression in accord with the times is buried in the text, he rooted his argument in reason, history, and problem solving. Indeed, in an article published during the war years, Tunnard proposed that "the right style for the twentieth century is no style at all, but a new conception of planning the human

environment." As James Rose had suggested several years before, Tunnard proposed modern architecture as the role model for a contemporary approach to landscape design: "Modern landscape design is inseparable from the spirit, technique, and development of modern architecture."^[32] Clearly, the emerging generation saw its future in parallel with architecture rather than with the more specific investigations of painting and sculpture. While the latter almost always stood far in advance of the "social arts"—and avant-garde—in most instances they lacked a client, a program, and space—all requisites of landscape design.

Although locked into a more ossified theoretical stance than its architecture counterpart, the landscape program at the Graduate School of Design allowed its students the latitude to take courses in other subject areas and strike out on their own in both formulating and designing landscapes of their choosing—or at least subvert their studio assignments. Certain of Eckbo's projects were controlled by a formality not totally foreign to the work he had produced at Berkeley or during his year at the Armstrong Nurseries. By this time, however, narrow columns of explanatory text began to accompany each assignment, as a sort of sermon on landscape theory. For one project for a country estate, the notes read:

A country estate: a place where people live in the country; in intimate and sympathetic relation with the landscape; areas used by man, formed by man in an intelligent and unashamed manner. Areas unused by man left natural. Developed and undeveloped areas concentrated so as to achieve maximum effect from each, and contrast of two together. A forecourt is a reception room for automobiles, let it be an extension of the house, not an approach to it. People like to dine out of doors, swim and play tennis in gay surroundings, sit and walk in the shade, and look out on a pleasant, spacious view .^[33]

The estate's design continued the long tradition of more formally planned areas—forecourts, terraces, and orchards—set against the naturalistic order of the woods, in essence, continuing the play between geometrically and informally planned zones.

If these early assignments suggested a wavering between what he had learned at Berkeley and what he was acquiring through his

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10
Freeform Park, Washington, D.C. Partial site/planting plan. Student project at Harvard University, 1937.
Pencil on tracing paper.
[Documents Collection ]

architectural forays at Harvard, the design for a Freeform Park in Washington, D.C., left no question about his future direction.^[34] The overall planning of the island site in the Potomac was asymmetrically developed, heavily weighted toward its western tip [see plate I]. The approach road cut northward across the island before veering west toward the park's central space. Here, tree plantings spiraled toward a round pool at the plaza's center flanked by a tower made of two concrete slabs (architecture student friends helped Eckbo on the design) [figures 10, 11]. London plane trees prevailed, lining the edge of the road and enclosing the plaza. A grid of ornamental apple trees (Malus sylvestris ) was planted as a foil for the roads and for clumps of locusts and maples.

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11
Freeform Park, Washington, D.C.
Sketch of the tower. Student
project at Harvard University,
1937. Pencil on tracing paper.
[Documents Collection ]

The note accompanying the rendered site plan dispelled any doubt about the author's patriotic and artistic intentions behind the design:

A memorial to the fathers of our country in which the informal becomes modern, modern goes informal, but a tree remains a tree. The topographical spirit of the island is preserved insofar as possible: a low ridge, from which one looks out and down. The bell tower is a structure of reinforced concrete, steel, and glass, which substitutes lightness, grace, and openness for the monumental tombstone effect. Tree masses used to relate tower to the island and define movement of circulation .^[35]

Even at this early date, we see Eckbo bristling against the simple bifurcation of approaches to landscape into the informal and the formal, and to the application—however updated—of received ideas. Instead, he was searching for a new vocabulary, a vocabulary like the International style in architecture, to announce the arrival of modernity. More important, this idiom would signal a new regard for landscape architecture in society. His search sought sources in architecture, painting, and sculpture.