Test your Design IQ
Who was the American landscape architect who opened the door for what has become known as the California Style of landscaping?
MANILA, Philippines - He was born on April 27, 1902 in Boston, but grew up in Oakland, California. He received his BA degree in landscape architecture at the University of California in Berkeley in 1922, and later his master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
After traveling to Italy and Spain on a Sheldon Fellowship that was awarded to him at Harvard, he taught at the Ohio State University for a year before returning to the San Francisco Bay area where he opened an office.
At the time he started practicing, the Neo-Classic movement was still the design style of choice. While his education and travels instilled in him a sense of the classical form, he has become known as the one who opened the door to the Modern movement in landscape architecture in the so-called California Style.
In his book, Gardens are for People, he outlined four principles in his design process. These include unity, which is the consideration of the schemes of both house and garden as a whole; function, which is the relation of the practical service areas to the needs of the household and the relation of the decorative areas to the desires and pleasures of those who use it. The third is simplicity, upon which may rest both the economic and aesthetic success of the layout; and lastly scale, which is the pleasant relation of parts to one another.
While he used the modern idea of freedom of elements such as form and movement, he never abandoned the solid design principles of the past. One of the things that made his designs simple, unique, and influential was the seamless marriage of two opposite design principles. Another design principle he often used was the idea of outdoor living space or dividing the landscape into separate “rooms.”
The majority of his work was residential, and he reportedly created over 2,000 designs, the most noted of which is the Donnell Gardens in Sonoma County, California.
He also designed the grounds of the American Embassy in Havana, the General Motors Research Center in Detroit, the Des Moines Art Center, the Hotel El Panama in Panama City, the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, and Parkmerced in San Francisco.
The modern residential landscape in California, and possibly the whole of the US as we know it, had its beginnings from a small group of designers of which he was the founding father.
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Last week’s question: In what city and country is the Padrão dos Descobrimentos or Monument to the Discoveries located?
Answer: Lisbon, Portugal
Winner: Anne Sherill Suarez of QC
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