The New York Times, February 2, 1997, A&E, p. 33.
A California show sheds new light on a half century of work by Garrett Eckbo, whose landscapes always placed people in the foreground.
By Martin Filler
Berkeley, Calif. -- The view from Garrett Eckbo's house high in the Berkeley Hills is one of the most dazzling in the United States, a panorama encompassing San Francisco, its bay and its bridges. Yet to Mr. Eckbo, the 86-year-old dean of West Coast landscape architects, the outlook is less than enthralling. "I know this is controversial," he said with a sly grin, "but I'm so tired of the Bay Area congratulating itself on what a marvelous place this is when it's really a bloody mess."
Mr. Eckbo spoke as he and his wife of 59 years, Arline, paused while packing cartons of books in preparation for their move to a retirement home in nearby Oakland. It was a few days before the show "Garrett Eckbo: Modern Landscapes for Living" opened at Berkeley's University Art Museum, where it will remain through March 11. The curators, Dorothee Imbert, a landscape historian, and Marc Treib, an architecture professor at the University of California, Berkeley, have included drawings, plans, photographs and models in the exhibition, which is accompanied by a substantive catalogue.
"Over the years I've done a lot of flying across the country," said Mr. Eckbo, whose broad, craggy face bespeaks his Norwegian ancestry, "and from an airplane it looks as if nobody knew what they were doing or where they were building. There's a near total absence of physical community in America today, no sequence of qualitative connections and experiences. What we landscape architects are about is to try to bring some intelligence to that pattern."
Mr. Eckbo's great success in doing just that is evident in the more than 1,000 highly varied schemes he produced for clients ranging from migrant farm workers in California's Central Valley to Gary Cooper in Beverly Hills. But despite his important role in creating a distinctive new style of American landscape design during the expansive postwar years -- when his lively, innovative gardens were the horticultural equivalents of the architecture and furniture of Charles and Ray Eames -- Mr. Eckbo is still not as celebrated as his contemporary co-professionals Thomas Church and Dan Kiley.
That relative lack of recognition most likely stems both from Mr. Eckbo's commitment to now unfashionable social concerns and his refusal to think that bigger necessarily means better. "In the landscape profession," Mr. Eckbo explained, "small gardens are not seen as our highest aspiration. If you can do a 50-acre park, it must be more important. But for me the private garden has always been a laboratory for developing new ideas and concepts. Any family that has a quarter-acre backyard has got a real project. Any improvement of any space is a step forward."
Born in Cooperstown, N.Y., and brought up in Alameda, Calif., Mr. Eckbo began studying architecture at Berkeley in 1933, when Beaux-Arts principles still prevailed despite the Depression. "Then I got to Harvard, where I encountered the modern movement," he recalled. "Modern art and architecture to a considerable extent had a social background, and that was pretty exciting."
Under the influence of Harvard Graduate School of Design professors like Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, Mr. Eckbo began to produce plans that bore a strong resemblance to the free-form compositions of Bauhaus teachers like Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Wassily Kandinsky. Their geometric abstractions are reflected in the typical Eckbo layout with asymmetrical diagonals, arcs and circles. But Mr. Eckbo was no esthete, and on graduation he was drawn to work of missionary seriousness.
Taking a job in the San Francisco office of the Farm Security Administration, the New Deal agency set up to cope with the nation's agricultural crisis, Mr. Eckbo turned from designing for the country's richest citizens to its poorest. " 'The Grapes of Wrath' was our bible," he said of Steinbeck's 1939 novel about farmers dislocated by the dust bowl. "The F.S.A. was a remarkable experience because it had the really creative atmosphere a public agency can have if it's not inhibited by some frustrating force."
Significantly, Mr. Eckbo and his colleagues invested their transient farm encampments with all the dignity, variety and care usually reserved for prestigious civic commissions. As Mr. Eckbo later wrote, they deployed "large tree patterns at the baroque scale on cheap rural land."
Those major organizational plantings of Chinese elms, cottonwoods, mulberries, sycamores and other hardy species were softened with magnolias, oaks and olives for shade and almond and plum trees for color. The landscape architect sees nothing extraordinary about going to such trouble for the dispossessed. "You were conscious of social problems that existed, and you tried to think of ways to improve them," he said.
During World War II, the agency shifted its focus to housing for defense workers. Mr. Eckbo designed site plans for 50 such settlements on the West Coast. But peace brought a different public attitude. "There were products we wanted to buy, things we wanted to do, a great outflow of energy, demand and desire. Prosperity is bad for morale," he said. "It makes us greedy."
Mr. Eckbo had a leading hand in planning what many scholars consider the postwar period's finest subdivision scheme, the 256-acre Ladera Housing Cooperative near Palo Alto. But the project was never fully realized without Federal Housing Authority financing, which was probably withheld because the community was racially integrated, according to Ms. Imbert and Mr. Treib.
In 1946 Mr. Eckbo resettled in Los Angeles to take advantage of its growing opportunities for private practice. Never a puritan, he threw himself with gusto into defining the landscape of a new American dream. "L.A. is larger, looser, a place of freer movement socially than the Bay Area," he said. "The years I spent there were the best of my professional life."
Mr. Eckbo's eagerness to experiment during the 1950's was epitomized by his theatrical Beverly Hills swimming pool design for the owner of Cole of California, the bathing suit company. The landscape architect cantilevered a steel beam spanning the width of the pool to support a masonry wall and a series of concrete diving platforms that allowed models to swim under the backdrop unnoticed and then emerge like Esther Williams from the deep.
In other projects, Mr. Eckbo advanced the quintessential California mode of indoor-outdoor living, casual recreation and the flexible use of space. In 1963 he returned to Berkeley to head the department of landscape architecture where he had been a student. Though he gave up designing when he turned 80, he still writes, and his forthcoming book, "People in a Landscape," is a summation of humanistic principles that may seem novel to a young generation that has grown up in a very different climate for design in the public realm.
"The alleged guardians of the landscape look at what we call good sense as an intrusion on their prerogatives," Mr. Eckbo said. "That's the feeling put out by the people who make money by putting it out, in the true spirit of enterprise. What should happen in the next century is a developing understanding of the basic relations between society and nature. There is a social ideal that's badly mangled but still around -- that we should all work together cooperatively. That's a simple and powerful idea."
Two photos (97K): Garrett Eckbo, right, at home in Berkeley and, below, the Wohlstetter garden in Los Angeles, a design from the mid-50's that helped advanced the quintessential California idea of indoor-outdoor living.
Martin Filler, who often writes about architecture, is a consulting curator of the Brooklyn Museum exhibition "Vital Forms in America, 1940-1960," planned for 1999.
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