Eckbo began to define his own Modernist theory by establishing connections among landscape design, architecture, and art. While the landscape department conformed to a Beaux-Arts tradition and the formal/informal dialectic, the architecture department at Harvard was undergoing a complete transformation under the leadership of Walter Gropius, who had joined the faculty in 1937. Hubbard and Theodora Kimball’s Introduction to the Study of Landscape Design, a textbook which he condemned as formulaic and overly aesthetic. Soon disillusioned with the school’s traditional curriculum, Eckbo questioned the legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted and the program’s reliance on Henry V. In the fall of 1936, Eckbo drove east to enroll in the Department of Landscape Architecture. “In common practice fills in the gaps between the work of the architect, the engineer, and nature.” -Garret Eckbo, Creative Design for the LandscapeĪ scholarship to Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design allowed him to move beyond the service industry. Employed by Armstrong Nurseries in Ontario, California, for a year, he produced approximately one hundred garden plans and acquired a wide knowledge of southern California plants. Upon graduating in June 1935, Eckbo moved south. Vaughan and the Great Depression years impressed Berkeley landscape students with the need for pragmatic and reductive design, even though their projects rarely strayed from adaptations of historical styles, as witnessed in Eckbo’s 1934 design entitled, Estate in the Manner of Louis XIV. Church at Ohio State University, as being influential in his professional development. Leland Vaughan, a former student of Thomas D. After a year at Marin Junior College, Eckbo entered the Division of Landscape Design and Floriculture at the University of California at Berkeley, in the fall of 1932. Prospects improved in 1929 with a six-month visit to a wealthy and enterprising paternal uncle in Oslo, Norway, spurring young Eckbo’s ambition to pursue a higher education. In 1912, following his parents’ divorce, he moved with his mother to Alameda, east of San Francisco, where he grew up with very limited social opportunities. Eckbo served as the head the Department of Landscape Architecture at Berkeley from 1969 to 1975 and received the Medal of Honor from the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1975.Īlthough born in Cooperstown, New York, to Theodora Munn and Axel Eckbo on November 28, 1910, Garrett Eckbo identified with California. Housing Authority, migrant-worker camps for the Farm Security Administration, the 1959 Forecast Garden for the Aluminum Company of America, and the formation of Eckbo, Dean, Austin and Williams, later known as EDAW. His numerous books include Landscape for Living (1950), defining the modern landscape architecture discipline, and People in a Landscape (1997), championing landscape design as an agent of social change.Įckbo’s significant design contributions include a prototypical housing project for the U.S. Together with classmates Dan Kiley and James Rose, Eckbo produced “Landscape Design in the Urban Environment”, “Landscape Design in the Rural Environment,” and “Landscape Design in the Primeval Environment” ( Pencil Points, now Progressive Architecture, 1938-1939). Publication of his master’s thesis project, 'Contempoville', as well as “Small Gardens in the City” in Pencil Points (September 1937) brought recognition. Disenchanted with the traditional landscape curriculum taught at Harvard, Eckbo pursued architecture classes with Walter Gropius and began to define his Modernist theory based on a multidisciplinary design approach, with landscape design as a vehicle for social change.

A native of Alameda, California, Eckbo entered the Department of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design in 1936.

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