Of Gardens. Paula Deitz
Paris at 50, avenue Montaigne. Although placed in a contemporary setting, the elements, new and spare—rows of pyramidal hornbeams and espaliered lindens in alternation with long basins of water—evoke the spirit of a young seventeenth-century garden. What gives it away as a Van Valkenburgh landscape are the stainless steel water columns that terminate the basins as well as the steel runway and viewing platform, and benches designed by Judy McKie in the form of jaguar cats. Where Van Valkenburgh differs from the landscape architect Dan Kiley, who has also acknowledged the influence of Le Nôtre, is in disrupting the geometric order and linear symmetry. Because of some irregular spacing that is his trademark, a crossview of the garden makes the symmetrical arrangement dissolve into a simple bosque of trees. But still, the minimal form of this garden conveys the richness of centuries of French culture.
Van Valkenburgh achieved a similar effect with a birch bosque he designed for a property in Redding, Connecticut, where he planted sixty white spire birch trees in four rows on a slight incline at the edge of some woods. Like the linear Black Granite Garden and the courtyard of 50, avenue Montaigne, the experience of walking among the trees gives the sense of order dissolving only to become ordered again. The only other experience in art that compares with this is watching a corps de ballet dance Balanchine's choreography—just as the dancers give visual satisfaction by lining up, they break ranks into new groups in a constant pattern of resolution and dissolution.
All of this leads to the commission which may be the summit of his career to date, the new Master Plan for the Harvard Yard Landscape. As a sacred space in American history, it compares in importance to the Tuileries in Paris. Van Valkenburgh admits that to alter either of these spaces is like being asked to repaint the Mona Lisa. Still Harvard is home to Michael Van Valkenburgh, and he speaks of the Yard—a word that has all the connotations of a workaday enclosure attached to purposeful buildings—as an aesthetic unto itself representing Yankee parsimony and elegant frugality. The challenge for him is how to intervene without making the landscape look significantly revised.
Essentially, the landscape is composed of a ground plane of grass crossed with paths under a high canopy of deciduous trees, a combination, according to Van Valkenburgh, that provides a unique sense of place, a New England commons. The firm's sketches for the project demonstrate that Van Valkenburgh's extensive knowledge of tree planting will be as important to our century as Le Nôtre's was for his. Drawings of the Old Yard show how the central axis will be reinforced with tulip poplar trees and how the general replanting will look with rows of unevenly spaced trees. In the part of the yard called Tercentenary Theater, he plans to develop a central halo of light in the deciduous canopy by planting honey locusts in the center with red oaks and red maples at the periphery.
A view of these gardens and landscapes provides an anthology of a sensibility that is intensely original, modernist, and respectful of the past. I met Michael Van Valkenburgh and first saw a garden of his in 1986 at the Urban Center in New York during an exhibition called “Transforming the American Garden: 12 New Landscape Designs.” We stood together next to his submission, a model for a visionary corporate garden called Eudoxia: A New Civic Landscape. It was spatial and sculptural, and it used elements of private gardens, like hedges and herbaceous borders, in colorful hues that related to the city. But what I remember most was the tissue-paper model for the twenty-five-foot-high ice and water wall and what he said about the sounds of water and the fragrance of moisture. The image of the ice wall is lodged in my imagination as if I had seen it. I missed the real ones he constructed in Radcliffe Yard in the winter of 1988, but I have the newspaper photograph of him in front of them—a spare white glistening veneer. In a kind of magical alchemy, Michael Van Valkenburgh can take old elements and transform them into new visions.
Design with the Land: Landscape Architecture of Michael VanValkenburgh, Harvard University Graduate School of Design exhibition catalogue, Princeton Architectural Press, 1994
A Cultivated Civilization: Barbara Stauffacher Solomon's Drawings of Classical Gardens
IN 1904, Edith Wharton set out to reveal what she called “Italian gardenmagic” in her book Italian Villas and Their Gardens. Wharton laid the ground rules by saying the “garden must be adapted to the architectural lines of the house” and provide “shady walks, sunny bowling-greens, parterres, and orchards.” All this happened, of course, only after castle walls disappeared. Before that, the garden was like an interior room, a respite set within the parapets. What Wharton did for the Renaissance house and garden in elegant yet direct prose, California landscape architect Barbara Stauffacher Solomon has achieved in delicate colored-pencil drawings that are masterworks of technique. By limiting herself to a small eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch format, she bears out her own thesis that within a disciplined environment, here the classical garden, the imagination can achieve the greatest release.
By now, Solomon has produced more garden plans on gallery walls than in the ground. Nevertheless, her composite drawings and photographic collages, which convey the essence of place and time in historic landscapes, have made her an influential scribe and seer in the field of garden design. It is not surprising that the wall is fertile ground for Solomon; starting out as an artist in the 1960s, she gained immediate fame as the inventor of supergraphics when her bold stripes and huge letters in blue, red, and black became murals at William Turnbull and Charles Moore's Sea Ranch condominium in Sonoma.
Then, as she worked toward a master's degree in architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, “the grand scale was boiled down to simplicity,” she explains, and her new format in a new medium was born. She remembers learning how to draw trees in a plant materials course. Since then, from a studio in her native San Francisco and on sojourns abroad, she has been turning out magical combinations of plans and elevations with maps and scenery—only now these elements are executed in compressed images.
She draws on a desk in front of six crocks of colored pencils of many different brands, including one from Switzerland, to obtain the fullest range of colors. These drawings can be compared to the experience of garden visits as preserved in memory, which is indeed the basis for her technique, along with historical research. Sudden shifts of scale and dotted sight lines reproduce the sensation of travel or of a passing train of thought. In her “manifesto” drawing, she follows the garden as it moves outside: two identical grids, one dotted in brown, the other in green, demonstrate how the grid of the garden became the grid of the house. The caption: “There is a garden which is neither forest nor farm.”
Writing about the Villa Lante in Bagnaia, Wharton describes a natural woodland as “boldly worked into the general scheme, the terraces and garden architecture skillfully blent with it…its recesses…pierced by grass alleys leading to clearings where pools surrounded by stone seats slumber under the spreading branches.” From this passage, one turns to Solomon's drawing of the twin pavilions at Villa Lante, attributed to Tommaso da Siena, who also designed the gardens she depicts stretching out to the woodland. All her drawings are accompanied by brief passages verging on prose poems, a stream of consciousness that includes her own thoughts and those she has gleaned from literature. Of Villa Lante she writes, “through gardens parting palaces,” and she describes the natural woodlands there as “pinewoods become pergolas.” Villa Lante's axiality and perspective owe much, it is frequently said, to the architectural theories inaugurated by Donato Bramante. The integration suggested by Wharton is here rendered with great clarity.
At first, Solomon's drawings appear to be of fantasy gardens because they are composites of various views and vistas, including elevations, axonometric projections, and site plans, all within one flat plane. Every line, however, is real, based on historical and photographic research and on Solomon's own observations during leisurely walks through gardens. As a result, they also function as a personal account of her own impressions, for she singles out a point of reference, a particular vista or allée of trees, or an entrance revealed in a single vignette. With finely drawn sight lines, she leads the eye from a small detail in the general plan to its enlarged image or a secondary view of it. The effect is of gardens as they are recalled in memory. Each written phrase unlocks in her readers' minds myriad images of other remembered landscapes.
A collection of her drawings of French and Italian Renaissance gardens along with written descriptions is the focus of an exhibition called “Green