Painting, Sculpture, and Landscape Design
More significantly perhaps, modern painting signaled the arrival of non-perspectival space, an idea with which landscape designers could counter the thrust of the formal axis or the informal clump. Joan Miró spoke of the "motionless movement" he sought in painting, another idea with possible application to the new garden: "As there is no horizon line nor indication of depth, [the forms] are displaced in depth. They are also displaced in plane, because a colour or a line leads fatally to a displacement of the angle of vision. Inside the large forms, small forms move. And, when you look at the whole picture, the large forms become mobile in turn."[52]
Denied the picture plane, painting could become a space without areal boundaries and possessing infinite depth, undermining the reading of the painting as a representation with ties to the objective world. The space and movement of a landscape employing the elements of nonobjective painting—here turned into "nonobjective spaces"—could better accommodate contemporary living outdoors. The years at Harvard constituted a pivotal stage in Eckbo's formation; and academic study gave him a laboratory for pure research and its applied development. Several design studies investigated the linkage of modern art with Eckbo's more socially rooted ideas.
The 1937 project for, and subsequent publication of, "Small Gardens in the City" functioned as an advanced manifesto for the urban landscape [figure 21]. The undertaking was entirely self-motivated, intended to serve as a near-culmination to his graduate study—a thesis would follow—and a testing of ideas concerning the elements of a modern urban landscape.[53] Eckbo developed the design of eighteen gardens on a single city block, patterned in dimension on the urban units of San Francisco with which he was so familiar: "This was a study of design possibilities—a study of physical form, based on the idea that the content would develop over time."[54] The architecture of the houses to complement the gardens was more or less assumed and in the end mattered little in terms of the site design—other than the functional connection between indoor and outdoor spaces.
21
Small Gardens in the City. Model. Student project at Harvard University. 1937.
[Documents Collection ]
The site sloped slightly, affording minimal opportunities to sculpt the terrain. The gardens—presented in model form as an entirety and individually as axonometric ink drawings—developed variations on particular themes [figure 22a-d]. Some designs seem to have begun with the limits of the site and worked inward; others expanded outward from the living spaces of the house. The thrust of the designs varied from those aligned with the shape of the lot, to those turned obliquely to the walls, to those using a less geometric idiom as a means to distance the garden from the rectangular bonds of the lot. In one garden, arc segments descended the slope in overlapping terraces; another employed a geometry rotated 45 degrees to the edges of the site. The modeled ground plane acquired a third dimension, and considerable tracts of paving complemented areas of low vegetation and ground covers. Tree plantings were arranged more freely, in places appearing more as sculptural elements than as providers of shade and mass. Pergolas and other light structures completed the designer's palette.
With all their innovation and individual formal brilliance, the eighteen gardens created little sense of a continuous landscape; they remained discretely conceived and bounded. Only in certain minor gestures—like the zigzag fence that traversed the property limits—did Eckbo challenge the tyranny of the lot line.[55] The street side of each house was left untouched. Like a botanical garden, with each plot assigned to a different plant family, each unit tested a varied formal vocabulary but left the greater question of the urban landscape conglomerate unquestioned. Eckbo would address this issue in his thesis, Contempoville, completed the following year.
Conceived as an independent school project, "Small Gardens in the City" was published within six months of its completion in Pencil Points , one of the United States' leading architectural journals. Taking stock of his audience, Eckbo wrote an explanatory text, laying the ground rules for the small bounded site and elucidating the assumptions behind his investigations. He cited his original thoughts and added an updated commentary in a 1993 memoir:
"Gardens are places in which people live out of doors."
"Gardens must be the homes of delight, of gaiety, of fantasy, of illusion, of imagination, of adventure." These
a
Abstraction of natural contours, curved terraces
follow nature slope. Curves need be neither
"noturalistic" nor "formal." Any garden made by
man is formed, therefore formal. Outside
connection of garden with second-story living
room is very important to unity of house and
garden and circulation.
b
Spatial design. Shape of an area warped to break up
feeling of hard enclosure. Colonnade gives distance
by partial concealment and enframement of lower
end of garden. Ample planting space. Change in
property line by agreement between two owners.
c
Repetition of a simple square turned at a 45-degree angle.
Line of descent follows natural slope. Plants as specimens.
Water either moving or soil. Abstraction of natural forms,
the spirit, nor the semblance.
d
Water garden. Population of aquatics, fish, frogs,
and turtles. Thrill of crossing by stepping stones
to lower sitting area. Pattern from second-story
living room.
22a–d
Small Gardens in the City. Axonometric studies.
Student project at Harvard University, 1937.
Ink on tracing paper.
[Documents Collection ]
are not physical qualities. The assumption was that bold and free arrangements of space and material would generate such feelings and responses .
"Designs shall be three-dimensional. People live in volumes, not planes."
"Designs shall be areal, not axial." . . . Spatial experience is more than a line .
"Design shall be dynamic, not static." . . . Axial design tends to be static, its obvious purpose being to express and freeze the status quo. We do not want to live in a static world .[56]
With his graduate studies still uncompleted, Eckbo had already received validation through publications in leading art and design journals.