Gardens in the Modern Landscape. Christopher Tunnard
These gestures, with Moore’s Recumbent Figure, Nash’s “dream” through the viewing frame, the concrete materials, unusual chairs, and a patio where a path stretches toward the view through the screen, all allow a convincingly modern garden to cohabit with the box-like building behind.
He worked on other gardens and projects, some of which were illustrated for him by Gordon Cullen (pp. 72–76). Nicely idiosyncratic, these include a weekend house at Cobham, Surrey, with swimming pool and architectural planting, and Tunnard’s own place at St Ann’s Hill (somewhat similar to the patio at Bentley Wood and featuring the sculpture by Willi Soukop), with a distant view of Halland (all these designs featured lawns). And they all suggest either a very minimalist landscape—with pavers set in the grass at Cobham and St Ann’s Hill—or cubist flower beds and vegetable gardens, and all but one show people using them; the landscapes are represented to suggest the relationship of the modern building to Tunnard’s landscape designs. These images of private gardens have an uncanny resemblance to some of the drawings that Lawrence Halprin would make for his private clients, mainly in California during the 1940s and 1950s.26
For the house Land’s End, in Gaulby, Leicester (designed by Raymond McGrath), Tunnard, as well as Frank Clark, drew and redrew plans during the late 1930s, though the final authorship of the landscape is either debated or (inevitably) the result of the melding of various contributions. What seem to be in Tunnard’s hand is again the open and irregular lawn surrounded by a series of gardens, some of which were set in rectangles in the manner of Guevrekian’s Villa Noialles; perimeter walks that edged the site (in both format and the use of color to lengthen perspectives, those walks were a distinct eighteenth-century reference); a shelter or pavilion in the Japanese style overlooking a pond; and the sight of adjacent pinewoods drawn into the more manicured garden.
Where Tunnard’s interests really seemed to develop, in the years immediately before he left for the United States in 1938, was in thinking about how to save and develop the eighteenth-century estate of Claremont and in the ideas that he devised for minimal housing plots. The Claremont proposals are set out in his text (pp. 149ff), but the housing projects are not. The latter were featured both in Architecture Review 85 (1939), which suggested ways to design a “standard” and suburban garden plot,27 and in the exhibition devised with Clark for the Institute of Landscape Architects, as reported in an autumn issue of Landscape and Garden (1938). Tunnard’s proposal for small suburban plots and how the garden elements might be varied or developed were a less intricate version of the same ideas that Garrett Eckbo was producing at Harvard’s GSD in 1937 and 1938.28 When he added plans and photographs of “Modern American Gardens” in the 1948 edition (pp. 167–74)—noting that it was “too soon to discern any distinct stylistic innovations”—he had clearly extended his English work through contacts with Eckbo and American practice.
In America he continued to design, providing gardens for two houses designed by Holmes Perkins. He worked on gardens around Cambridge for Carl Koch, a Harvard architecture alumnus, and also for a private garden in Rhode Island and gardens for the premises and museum of the New London Country Historical Society in Connecticut. He proposed designs for the sculpture garden at the Musuem of Modern Art (this was not implemented), but along with three young architects, won third prize in the competition for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial (won by Eero Saarinen).29 He also collaborated on the journal Task, issued by the GSD at Harvard, for which he wrote articles on regional planning in 1941, on the reprecussions of the war on “British” planning in the third issue, on Robert Moses and Portland, Oregon (issue 5), and, by then at Yale in 1948, on “Is architecture an art?”30
The afterlife of Gardens in the Modern Landscape concerns not only its historical origins—how it featured and functioned within the modernism of the 1930s—but also how we today still might find it useful. Originally, it had mixed reviews. Some were skeptical about its “modern” emphasis and felt that it would soon become a “period piece,” while others found it thoughtful and provocative.31 The rich, but also eclectic, ideas that Tunnard espoused and wrestled with may yield an agenda of topics today, especially when landscape architecture seems to be trying, not always successfully, to invent a new image and function for itself that “landscape urbanism” or “ecological urbanism” has sought. Back in 1958, twenty years after the 1938 edition, Ian Mcharg wrote to Tunnard asking for suggestions as to what book he would recommend to be “most indicative of the path towards the design of open space to 20th century society”;32 there was nothing, then or now, that leapt to mind.
The historical importance of Gardens in the Modern Landscape is that it was one of the few books to confront the role of garden making in international modernism. Tunnard was far ahead of his time (and may still be, though only by being paradoxically retarditaire). That his book did not fully succeed in making or establishing that role was the result partly of the confusion and complexity of ideas with which Tunnard was wrestling and partly because landscape architecture has never found that task easy; it continues to argue its way awkwardly into the mainstreams of modern thinking, not least because it is self-confessedly atavistic, especially in garden designs, which continue to flourish even when landscape architects value ambitious endeavors in the public sphere over the making of private gardens that tend to be more traditional. The garden exhibition he designed with Frank Clark in 1939 was, as he explained in a catalog entry, about how “in one way or another landscape architects play a part in every form of out-of-door planning and fulfill a function that is as vital to the community as that of their collaborators, the architect and the engineer.”33 He rooted for modernism (perhaps not realizing that there were multiple modernisms) and then renounced it; but modernism as he found it in architecture was not easily or necessarily apt for landscape architecture, yet his eye for good work such as Amsterdam’s Bos Park still locates him firmly in the vanguard. The original dust jacket of the 1938 edition makes this emblematically clear: one of Gordon Cullen’s drawings of a modern garden floats uneasily against a background that features a classical structure of a Claudean landscape painting.
The original dust jacket of the 1938 edition. Courtesy of Jan Woudstra.
However, Tunnard’s book also makes clear what must still be deemed central to the field. It was often witty and ironic (see pp. 14 or 49, for instance), and this sits uneasily with the solemn professionalism today. And he used his rhetorical skills to plead for the expansion of the garden into a larger landscape that these days includes not only the items that Tunnard identified—housing estates, factories, urban parkland, recreational sites—but also derelict factories and steel mills and unwanted industrial riverscapes. And that means we should welcome his insistence on cross-disciplinary collaboration between design and planning (essentially recapitulating his own career). He valued also preservation, and came to do so even more after this book was published, and preservation stimulates creative rethinking (“creative urbanism” as it has been called34). Then there is the need to marry function with beauty, for despite his nervousness about that b-word, no landscape architect that I know wants to design ugly places, and there are fresh ways of registering beauty in austere and empathic minimalism—beauty is still the elephant in the room for many landscape architects (and it rarely, if at all, occurs as part of their professional training). In addition, Tunnard was always committed to history, not as an anthology of styles and mechanical forms to be copied, but as an arsenal of ideas.