Collective Landscapes

During his time at Harvard, Eckbo collaborated with architects and planners, sowing the seeds for his continuing interest in the greater sphere beyond the limits of the individual lot and garden. A project for a recreation center in South Boston, designed with architecture students Saunders, Robinson, Currie, and Crain, suggested the super-structure for public space assigned to varied use.^[57] This expanded scope of inquiry was further developed in his thesis study Contempoville, which portrayed Eckbo's vision for the ideal American suburb: a subdivision linked to an imagined 1945 world's fair in Los Angeles. Troubled by the valuing of individual expression over community good, Eckbo proposed a total landscape linked by pervasive rows of hedges reinforced by tall trees [figure 23]. Each family received its own domestic compound, each its privacy ensured by untrimmed hedges. Each site acknowledged its boundaries and yet appeared to develop centrifugally from the interior of the house. The planning idea held consistently throughout, yet Eckbo again used a remarkable variety of formal vocabularies for the designs of the gardens. Oval beds; skewed plantings of hedges; networks of interlocking paths—all these ground patterns were complemented by the higher masses and canopies of trees, composing the domestic space outdoors in three spatial levels. Eckbo's explanatory text read:

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23
Contempoville. Study for the overall site plan. Student project at Harvard University, 1938.
Ink on tracing paper.
[Documents Collection ]

House and garden developed as an organic unit which will present a compelling setting for the "more abundant life." The garden flows into the house; the house reaches out into the garden. . . . 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 .^[58]

This statement is remarkably prescient in summarizing Eckbo's regard for the single-family site and its relation to the community, and the relation of planned nature to its maintenance and growth.

Contempoville's layout employed the winding roads common to the American suburb, with a central park area that could be traced back to the common of colonial times. The suburb's subdivision and design, however, clearly reflected more advanced planning ideas, such as those of Clarence Wright and Henry Stein. Each of the house plans were designed by "real architects" and taken from professional publications;^[59] the Barcelona Pavilion made a cameo appearance as the social center of the plan, its reflecting pool adapted for the more mundane function of swimming. The structure's flowing spaces were joined to an amphitheater on one side by sinuous plantings of hedges; a tennis court abutted the buildings' eastern walls. Given the age of its designer, and the scope of his landscape designs executed until this time, the project evinced an astonishing cohesion from site plan to detailed garden plans. The specific vocabulary employed at Contempoville would be loosened in the succeeding decades. But in many respects—foremost among them the ideas of linkage, the group, and the individual home—would stay as constant foundations for almost all of Eckbo's community plans.

Although Contempoville was a more comprehensive and ultimately more significant exercise, it was the Small Gardens in the City project that announced to the architectural readership Eckbo's arrival as a professional with advanced ideas about modern landscape design. Its republication in France, and its inclusion in Margaret Olthof Goldsmith's 1941 Designs for Outdoor Living , reiterated the power of the ideas and the hunger for a new view of landscape architecture.^[60] In some ways, Eckbo seems to have already cut his connections with landscape architecture as it had been conceived and as it was prac-

ticed. Here was a vision more compressed and fitted to contemporary conditions and aesthetic developments, aimed at the city more than the estate of the wealthy client. Eckbo's use of publications reveals an incredible drive for soap-boxing, self-promotion, and astute utilization of the print medium. Indeed, he would become a prolific writer, with six books and countless articles published over half a century.