Garrett Eckbo (November 28, 1910 – May 14, 2000) was an American landscape architect notable for his seminal 1950 book Landscape for Living.

thumb|Garrett Eckbo by [[Imogen Cunningham, 1946]]

thumb|right| Eckbo, Dean, Royston, Williams

Early life

He was born in Cooperstown, New York, to Axel Eckbo, a businessman, and Theodora Munn Eckbo. In 1912, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois. After Eckbo's parents divorced, he and his mother relocated to Alameda, California, where they struggled financially while he grew up. After Eckbo graduated from high school in 1929, he felt a lack of ambition and direction and went to stay with a wealthy paternal uncle, Eivind Eckbo, in Norway. It was during his stay in Norway that he began to focus on his future. Once he returned to the U.S., he worked for several years at various jobs saving money so that he could attend college.

Education

After attending Marin Junior College for a year, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley where he majored in landscape architecture.

While Eckbo was at Berkeley he was influenced by two of the programs faculty members, H. Leland Vaughan and Thomas Church, who inspired him to move beyond the formalized beaux-arts style that was popular at the time. The Beaux Arts-movement is defined as being carefully planned, richly decorated and being influenced by classical art and architecture. Eckbo graduated with a B.S. in landscape architecture in 1935 and subsequently worked at Armstrong Nurseries in Ontario near Los Angeles where he designed about a hundred gardens in less than a year. After working at the Nurseries, he was restless to expand his creative horizons and entered Harvard University's Graduate School of Design by way of a scholarship competition, which he won.

Beginning his studies at Harvard, Eckbo found that the curriculum followed the Beaux-Arts method and was similar to the one at Berkeley but more rigidly entrenched. Eckbo, along with fellow students Dan Kiley and James Rose resisted and began to "explore science, architecture, and art as sources for a modern landscape design." and were photographed by Julius Shulman.

In 1956, the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA) asked Eckbo to create a garden containing large amounts of aluminum, for the company's publicity purposes. Aluminum had been widely used during the war years as a component in airplane manufacture, but ALCOA was interested in promoting the metal's peacetime use as well.

In 1963, he returned to Berkeley to head the department of landscape architecture where he had been a student.

The successful firm of Eckbo, Royston and Williams designed hundreds of projects including residential gardens, planned community developments, urban plazas, churches and college campuses.

thumb|An aerial view of the landscape at Union Bank Plaza

He would eventually form the highly successful firm Eckbo, Dean, Austin and Williams in 1964, which in 1973, officially adopted the moniker, EDAW. Guided by a progressive vision of the leadership role of landscape architecture, EDAW became involved in sustainable planning at the regional scale as early as the 1960s when the firm created the California Urban Metropolitan Open Space Plan for the State.

In a period in history when suburban sprawl was ascendant, EDAW's open space plan for the state of California was as innovative as it was provocative. The very idea of an "open space plan" was a novel one. The firm drew up plans to preserve open spaces in danger of encroachment on the fringes of the greater Los Angeles-San Diego, Palm Springs, San Francisco Bay and Lake Tahoe areas. In addition to protected county, state and federal lands existing at the time, EDAW's plan identified a further 330,000 acres for protection. In strong language, it warned against the automobile and foretold the climate crisis. "A new ethical attitude about land use is needed," intoned EDAW's report, "in order to protect the environment for everyone’s benefit."

EDAW also began to work internationally, with projects in New Delhi, India (Lodi Park and the Ford Foundation Headquarters) and Osaka, Japan (Civic Center) among other locations worldwide. Eckbo famously said: "design shall be dynamic, not static. Design shall be areal, not axial. Design shall be three dimensional, people live in volumes, not planes."

Growth in the firm continued apace in the 1970s and '80s, with new satellite offices in Alexandria, Virginia, and Atlanta, Georgia. In 1979 Eckbo left EDAW, the firm he helped to found. EDAW was acquired by AECOM Technology Corporation in 2005, whose work continuously strives to include cross-disciplinary work and link environmental and social goals to improve quality of life.

Leaving the firm in 1979, Eckbo first formed the firm Garrett Eckbo and Associates and finally Eckbo Kay Associates with Kenneth Kay.

Throughout Eckbo's career he maintained his vision of the interaction of art and science to create environments that were functional and livable, while maintaining the social, ecological and cultural approach to design.

In 1964, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full Academician in 1994. In 1968, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

He received numerous awards, including UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design Distinguished Alumnus of 1998, the American Society of Landscape Architects Medal of Honor in 1975, the Architectural League of New York's gold medal in 1950 and the American Institute of Architect's merit award in 1953. In 1970, he won an American Society of Landscape Architects' merit award for Lodi Park in New Delhi, India.

"Art emotionalizes the intellect. Science intellectualizes the emotions. Together, they bring order to nature and freedom to man," he wrote in his 1969 book, The Landscape We See.

"Today, one finds the center of city or town only by the increasing height of buildings, the increasing clamor of lights and signs, and the increasing congestion of traffic," he wrote. "We still build temples and palaces and many other splendid structures, but they are lost in the modern urban jungle."

"Over the years I've done a lot of flying across the country," he said in an interview to Martin Filler of the New York Times,

Eckbo died on May 14, 2000, after a stroke. He was survived by his wife, Arline, of Oakland; daughters Marilyn Kweskin and Alison Peper of Los Angeles; six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Selected projects

  • 1935: Landscape design for architect Edwin Lewis Snyder, Berkeley, CA
  • 1938-44: Housing for migrant workers in California, Arizona and Texas
  • 1946: Park Planned Homes (architect: Gregory Ain), Altadena, CA
  • 1947-48: Community Homes
  • 1952: Alcoa Forecast Garden (Eckbo residence), Los Angeles, CA
  • 1962: Long-range development plan for the University of New Mexico
  • 1964-68: Union Bank Plaza (architect: Harrison & Abramovitz), Los Angeles, CA
  • 1966: Fulton Mall, Fresno, California
  • 1968: Lodhi Garden (architect: Joseph Allen Stein), New Delhi, India
  • 1970: Tucson Community Center, Tucson, AZ

Teaching

Eckbo taught at the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California from 1948 to 1956. Among his students were architect Frank Gehry. Gehry credits Eckbo and Simon Eisner, who taught city planning, in encouraging him to follow his "liberal political do-gooder leanings" and apply to Harvard Graduate School of Design for graduate work in city planning: "they also knew I wasn't interested in doing rich guys' houses and that I would be more emotionally inclined toward low-cost housing and planning."

He was the chairman of the Department of Landscape Architecture at UC Berkeley from 1963 to 1969.

Eckbo's social inquiry techniques, environmental, landscape and living teachings have continued to exert influence internationally through the practice of the firms he founded, including the large and international EDAW / AECOM and international students at UC Berkeley, such as Mexican architect and landscape architect Mario Schjetnan.

At the request of UC Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies, Eckbo wrote "Public Landscape," ranking architectural and planning successes and failures from the public arena.

Publications

  • 1950: Landscape for Living (Duell, Sloan & Pearce)
  • "a seminal book in landscape architecture"
  • republished in 2002 (Hennessey & Ingalls)
  • 1956: Art of Home Landscaping (McGraw-Hill)
  • 1964: Urban Landscape Design (McGraw-Hill)
  • 1969: The Landscape We See (McGraw-Hill)

Notes

Additional sources

  • Francis, M. & Hester, R. T. Jr. (eds): The Meaning of Gardens. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press; 1990.
  • Rogers, E. B.: Landscape Design: a Cultural and Architectural History. New York, NY: Harry Abrams, Inc.; 2001.
  • Treib, M & Imbert, D: 'Garrett Eckbo: Modern Landscapes for Living'. University of California Press, 1997.
  • Schwenk, K. (2001). "Garrett Eckbo: Pioneer of Modern Landscape". UNM-Quantum 2001. Retrieved August 30, 2004.
  • Treib, M. (2000). Thomas Church, Garrett Eckbo, and the Postwar California Garden (PDF file, 49 KB).
  • Garrett Eckbo Collection, Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley