Afterword
Garrett Eckbo
These have been good productive years (both aesthetically and socially), especially the twenty in southern California. Now, as I bow out, a new age is forming the next century. It will certainly be different. Architects and engineers seem heavily focused on increasingly rationalized construction that covers more and more of the Earth. It begins to justify various science fiction visions of a totally structured planet.
Parallel to this, the landscape architects and conservation people are focused on green open space within, around, and between cities, and the salvation of the natural landscape—whatever is left of it this year.
This is all well and good, but it misses the chief point of contention in the world landscape—the gap between structural and landscape visions. The former embodies the central outlook of the leading business/economic view of the world. It tolerates landscape visions but if they get in its way will not hesitate to ride over, and destroy, them. Its way embodies maximum profit for the chief protagonists.
The only way to save the world from the implications of this split attitude is to merge the two visions into a social/cultural/natural approach. That is the task for the coming century.
Shulman house. Photograph taken about the time of occupancy,
before planting had begun. Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, 1951.
Raphael Soriano, architect; Garrett Eckbo, landscape architect.
[Julius Shulman ]
Shulman house. Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, 1951. circa 1980.
Raphael Soriano, architect; Garrett Eckbo, landscape architect.
[Julius Shulman ]