Invisible Gardens: The Search for Modernism in the American Landscape

Invisible Gardens is a composite history of the individuals and firms that defined the field of landscape architecture in America from 1925 to 1975, a period that spawned a significant body of work combining social ideas of enduring value with landscapes and gardens that forged a modern aesthetic. The major protagonists include Thomas Church, Roberto Burle Marx, Isamu Noguchi, Luis Barragan, Daniel Urban Kiley, Stanley White, Hideo Sasaki, Ian McHarg, Lawrence Halprin, and Garrett Eckbo. They were the pioneers of a new profession in America, the first to offer alternatives to the historic landscape and the park tradition, as well as to the suburban sprawl and other unplanned developments of twentieth-century cities and institutions. The work is described against the backdrop of the Great Depression, the Second World War, the postwar recovery, American corporate expansion, and the environmental revolution. The authors look at unbuilt schemes as well as actual gardens, ranging from tiny backyards and play spaces to urban plazas and corporate villas. Some of the projects discussed already occupy a canonical position in modern landscape architecture; others deserve a similar place but are less well known. The result is a record of landscape architecture's cultural contribution - as distinctly different in history, intent, and procedure from its sister fields of architecture and planning - during the years when it was acquiring professional status and struggling to define a modernist aesthetic out of the startling changes in postwar America.

Arts & Photography

Walker, Peter

SIMO, Melanie

Architecture

Mit Pr

"In wildness is the preservation of the world," wrote Henry David Thoreau. But how the wild and the managed or artificially arranged environments co-exist has been a matter of intense debate among foresters and landscape professionals at least since the era of Frederick Law Olmsted Sr.In Forest and Garden, Melanie L. Simo ranges through a period of landscape history that has been underexamined, between Olmsted and mid-twentieth-century modernism, when the contours of the debate were formed and the landscape professions came of age. Simo’s book spans half a century, from the year that Charles Sprague Sargent’s influential Garden and Forest magazine ceased publication in 1897 to the appearance in 1949 of two unusual books about land and landscape―Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac and Jens Jensen’s The Clearing―that marked the beginning of a new ecological awareness.Forest and Garden covers this middle ground by focusing on the apparent oppositions between culture and nature, city and country, science and art, and between professions peopled with figures such as John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, the Olmsteds, Mary Austin, Willa Cather, Bernard Maybeck, Frank Lloyd Wright, Henry Beston, and Benton MacKaye. In this earlier era when novelists, conservationists, foresters, and landscape designers still shared a common language, Simo finds areas of overlap in how their writings express their perceptions of the land, its uses, its beauty, and its fate. Organizing her study by region and landscape type, from desert and prairie to Metropolitan New York and Boston, and extending from ecological concerns in garden design to Leopold’s call for a land ethic, Simo moves beyond the polarized views of current environmental debate.

Forest and Garden: Traces of Wildness in a Modernizing Land, 1897–1949

Science & Math

University of Virginia Press

In a world that is increasingly reliant on science, technology, and virtual relationships, our reciprocal and intimate connection to place has often been overlooked. This concern is now at the forefront of debate among environmental planners and designers, who are asking: What is distinctive and memorable about a certain place? Who lives there―or once did? What are the impacts of metropolitan growth, sprawl, and the loss of family farms?
In Literature of Place Melanie Simo looks beyond crowded malls and boarded-up storefronts on Main Street to our collective memory, finding answers to these questions in stories, novels, memoirs, poetry, essays, diaries, travel writing, and nature writing that range in origin from New England and the Southern Highlands to Hawaii and in subject from little gardens to lost or reinhabited places in cities, mill towns, deserts, and woodlands. In her consideration of selected American works from 1890 to 1970―years that mark the closing of the Western frontier and later openings in space exploration, environmental protection, genetic engineering, and cyberspace―Simo uncovers a literature of place and the often-surprising relationship of place to our daily lives.
While the exploration of outerspace and cyberspace may now seem limitless, some planners and designers are rediscovering ways of building from an earlier time and reconsidering the importance of place. In Literature of Place Simo furthers this movement by retrieving some common threads of attachment to place in works by John Steinbeck, Willa Cather, Henry James, Robert Frost, Wallace Stegner, Henry Beston, Rachel Carson, Loren Eiseley, Wendell Berry, J. B. Jason, Jane Jacobs, and others. By reconsidering works by such diverse and often surprisingly unknown writers, Simo seeks to broaden our understanding of place and stimulate the imagination of those who are creating and preserving memorable places in our time.
A companion volume to Forest and Garden: Traces of Wilderness in a Modernizing Land, 1897–1949, Literature of Place will appeal to urban designers, architects, landscape architects, environmental planners, literary and social historians, and all who are concerned about the fate of places in an increasingly "small" and remotely controlled world.

Literature of Place: Dwelling on the Land before Earth Day, 1970

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

0's some of the most important campus planning urban design, corporate landscapes, resorts and plans for new communities have been designed by Sasaki Associates.

Sasaki Associates: Integrated Environments

Spacemaker Press

100 Years of Landscape Architecture Some Patterns of a Century

ASLA Press

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Books by SIMO, Melanie