The modernist garden, which flourished in France between the 1910s and the 1930s, vividly mirrored the geometries and cubist aesthetics familiar to the decorative and fine arts of the period. Created by architects and artists, these gardens were often conceived as tableaux in which plants played a role only as pigment or texture. This handsomely illustrated book by Dorothée Imbert presents for the first time - in word and image - a comprehensive study of these arresting architectonic gardens.
The first biography and study of the work of Belgian landscape architect Jean Canneel-Claes, a significant but somewhat overlooked figure from the history of European modernism. In tracing his contributions, Imbert restores Canneel as a major figure in the development of landscape architecture into a modern discipline.
This volume focuses on the architect Philip Johnson's long association with The Museum of Modern Art, with essays examining his roles as patron, as curator, and as the institution's unofficial architect from the late 1940s to the early 1970s.
Among the more than 30 great and small projects within In & Out of Paris are Vaux-le-Vicomte, Versailles, and Courances—all classic André Le Nôtre–style French gardens. Also discover the Paris gardens of celebrated artist Jean-Michel Othoniel and art aficionado Pierre Bergé, architect Kenzo Takada’s Japanese retreat in the Bastille, Australian couturier Martin Grant’s tiny terrace in the Marais, Mexican painter MariCarmen Hernandez’s Montmartre rooftop, and American architect Michael Herrman’s homage to Le Corbusier’s surreal ChampsÉlysées garden for bon vivant Charles de Beistegui. Modern masters Louis Benech, Gilles Clement, Pascal Cribier, Christian Fournet, Camille Muller, Hugues Peuvergne, and Pierre-Alexandre Risser are also featured, representing a new era of experiments, color, and asymmetry in the Paris garden. ZAHID SARDAR is a San Francisco–based editor, writer, and curator specializing in architecture, interiors, and design. His work has appeared in Dwell, Interiors, Western Interiors & Design, Interior Design, House & Garden, Elle Décor, House Beautiful, and Landscape Architecture. He has taught design history at the California College of the Arts and has written several other books, including West Coast Modern and New Garden Design.
"The Modern Garden is the first fully illustrated overview of the great gardens of the twentieth century. It examines hundreds of gardens created throughout the century and around the world, from the works of Geoffrey Jellicoe to Roberto Burle Marx, Russell Page to Dan Kiley".--BOOKJACKET.
Visionary landscape architecture and garden design at mid-century in North America is captured by the greats of the era, including Julius Shulman and Ezra Stoller in many previously unpublished photographs. The treasures of mid-century American architecture have long been celebrated. Less appreciated has been the landscape design that provides the framing for these masterworks. But more than frame, landscape architecture is an art worthy of the spotlight, particularly at mid-century, when the notion that “gardens are outdoor spaces for people to live in” was championed and brought to the fore; now gardens and landscapes are not just external attributes to the house but a continuation of it and its living spaces in a relationship of symbiosis, with its pools and terraces, its winding lawns, and its partly enclosed room-like spaces flanked by brick or stone or plantings in a range of colors and forms. Approximately seventy-five mostly residential projects are thoroughly documented and recounted. Landscape architects whose work is featured include Thomas Church, Lawrence Halprin, and Garrett Eckbo, among others. Highlights include the dramatic surrounds of Richard Neutra’s Perkins House in its Pasadena hillside setting and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Marin County Civic Center, where environment and building comingle in an extraordinary modernist vision of the future made real. This book is both a wishful gesture toward a realignment of building with nature and a must-have for anyone with a visceral appreciation for a designed environment understood as an integrated whole. Ultimately, the book underlines the fundamental importance of gardens and landscape design, intended in the widest possible sense, for the quality of living of all individuals.
Twenty-two essays that provide a forum for assessing the tenets, accomplishments and limits of modernism in landscape architecture and for formulating ideas about possible directions for the future of the discipline These twenty-two essays provide a rich forum for assessing the tenets, accomplishments, and limits of modernism in landscape architecture and for formulating ideas about possible directions for the future of the discipline. During the 1930s Garrett Eckbo, Dan Kiley, and JamesRose began to integrate modernist architectural ideas into their work and to design a landscape more in accord with the life and sensibilities of their time. Together with Thomas Church, whose gardens provided the setting for California living, they laid the foundations for a modern American landscape design. This first critical assessment of modem landscape architecture brings together seminal articles from the 1930s and 1940s by Eckbo, Kiley, Rose, Fletcher Steele, and Christopher Tunnard, and includes contributions by contemporary writers and designers such as Peirce Lewis, Catherine Howett, John Dixon Hunt, Peter Walker, and Martha Schwartz who examine the historical and cultural framework within which modern landscape designers have worked. There are also essays by Lance Neckar, Reuben Rainey, Gregg Bleam, Michael Laurie, and Marc Treib that discuss the designs and legacy of the Americans Tunnard, Eckbo, Church, Kiley, and Robert Irwin. Dorothée Imbert takes up Pierre-Emile Legrain and French modernist gardens of the 1920s, and Thorbjörn Andersson reviews experiments with stylized naturalism developed by Erik Glemme and others in the Stockholm park system.
