Nona and Elizabeth Evans Restorative Garden, Cleveland Botanical Garden. Photographs courtesy Dirtworks Landscape Architecture, PC.

Please help us raise $35,000 to publish a new book by the renowned landscape architect David Kamp, FASLA. Kamp’s international career has been guided by a commitment to designing landscapes that promote the health and well-being of individuals and communities. Kamp’s firm, Dirtworks Landscape Architecture, is based on the philosophy that dirt works: nature can provide critical balance in our lives. 

Tracing the first stirrings of his interest in landscape to his childhood in rural North Carolina, Kamp writes about his architectural studies at the University of Virginia and the galvanizing experience of his first project, working on the landscape design for Australia’s new Parliament House in Canberra.

Natural Science Center Courtyard, Keene State College, NH.

In the mid-nineties Kamp volunteered to design The Joel Schnaper Memorial Garden for the Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center in East Harlem, the first garden created specifically for AIDS patients. The experience proved life-altering, and in the years that followed, he designed dozens of landscapes for a wide range of health care settings.

In time, Kamp took these ideas further into the public realm, where he applied them to landscapes for schools, parks, and brownfields. In these projects, he has sought to heal unhealthy sites, revitalize communities, and integrate broad social, economic, and ecological objectives. 

All donations of $250 or more received by October 15th will be acknowledged in the book. 

VIEW 2020 features articles about the designed meadows surrounding a mid-century house in Connecticut, teaching landscapes in Ann Arbor, Poughkeepsie, and Santa Barbara, and images of wild passages in NYC’s Central Park by acclaimed photographer Sara Cedar Miller. If you are not a member of LALH or your membership has lapsed, join now to receive your copy of our full-color magazine, devoted exclusively to North American landscape architecture.

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The first biography of the landscape architect Robert Royston (1918-2008) documents the life and work of a designer and teacher who shaped the postwar Bay Area landscape with visionary designs for public spaces. Early in his career, Royston conceived of the “landscape matrix,” a system of interconnected of parks, plazas, and parkways that he hoped could bring order and amenity to the rapidly developing suburbs. The ideals represented by the landscape matrix would inform his work on more than two thousand projects—landscapes as diverse as school grounds, new towns, transit corridors, and housing tracts.

As an apprentice of Thomas Church, Royston learned from a master in residential garden design, but he soon moved on to establish a partnership with Garrett Eckbo and Edward Williams and to launch an academic career at Berkeley. His experience with private gardens influenced his early public park designs, which he considered spaces for the American family—a novel concept at a time when such neighborhood parks were typically limited to playing fields and stock playground equipment. This new type of park not only offered distinct areas and activities for all ages, but also easy access to the community centers, libraries, and other facilities within the landscape matrix.

Royston, Hanamoto, and Mayes, the firm Royston founded in 1958, grew to become one of the nation’s most influential corporate firms. Over nearly six decades of practice, Royston helped to make the Bay Area a cohesive, desirable location to live and work. He designed landscapes to benefit community members of all ages, setting a high standard of inclusivity and environmental awareness. In addition to the many beloved places Royston created, his perceptive humanism, passed down to his students and colleagues, is his enduring legacy.

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LALH and the University of Georgia Press are pleased to announce the publication of The Greatest Beach: A History of Cape Cod National Seashore by Ethan Carr. 

In the mid-nineteenth century, Thoreau recognized the importance of preserving the complex and fragile landscape of Cape Cod, with its weathered windmills, expansive beaches, dunes, wetlands, and harbors, and the lives that flourished here, supported by the maritime industries and saltworks. One hundred years later, the National Park Service—working with a group of concerned locals, then-senator John F. Kennedy, and other supporters—took on the challenge of meeting the needs of a burgeoning public in this region of unique natural beauty and cultural heritage.

To those who were settled in the remote wilds of the Cape, the impending development was threatening, and, as the award-winning historian Ethan Carr explains, the visionary plan to create a national seashore came very close to failure. Success was achieved through unprecedented public outreach, as the National Park Service and like-minded Cape Codders worked to convince entire communities of the long-term value of a park that could accommodate millions of tourists. Years of contentious negotiations resulted in the innovative compromise between private and public interests now known as the “Cape Cod model.”

The Greatest Beach will be essential reading for all who are concerned with protecting the nation’s gradually diminishing cultural landscapes. In his final analysis of Cape Cod National Seashore, Carr poses provocative questions about how to balance the conservation of natural and cultural resources in regions threatened by increasing visitation and development.

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When Sidney J. Hare (1860–1938) and S. Herbert Hare (1888–1960) launched their Kansas City firm in 1910, they founded what would become the most influential landscape architecture and planning practice in the Midwest. Over time, their work became increasingly far-ranging, both in its geographical scope and project types. Between 1924 and 1955, Hare & Hare commissions included fifty-four cemeteries in fifteen states; numerous city and state parks (seventeen in Missouri alone); more than fifteen subdivisions in Salt Lake City; the Denver neighborhood of Belcaro Park; the picturesque grounds of the Christian Science Sanatorium in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts; and the University of Texas at Austin among fifty-one college and university campuses.

Authors Carol Grove and Cydney Millstein document the extraordinary achievements of this little-known firm and weave them into a narrative that spans the birth of the late nineteenth-century “modern cemetery movement” to midcentury modernism. Through the figures of Sidney, a “homespun” amateur geologist who built a rustic family retreat called Harecliff, and his son Herbert, an urbane Harvard-trained landscape architect who traveled Europe and lived in a modern apartment building, Grove and Millstein chronicle the growth of the field from its amorphous Victorian beginnings to its coalescence as a profession during the first half of the twentieth century. Hare & Hare, Landscape Architects and City Planners provides a unique and valuable parallel to studies of prominent East and West Coast landscape architecture firms—one that expands the reader’s understanding of the history of American landscape architecture practice.

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The American Garden at Midcentury

In the 1930s, American landscape architects began experimenting with designs that would give their clients easy access to outdoor spaces where they could relax and socialize informally. Especially in California, these designs served as extensions of interior spaces. LALH associate director Jonathan D. Lippincott will discuss the iconic gardens of several influential practitioners of the midcentury modern period, including Thomas Church, Ruth Shelhorn, Garrett Eckbo, and Dan Kiley.

February 16 / 10:30 a.m.

Robert Royston

Robert Royston was one of America’s most distinguished landscape architects during the postwar period. His design work and teaching helped define and establish California landscape modernism. Landscape architect JC Miller will present Royston’s work with an emphasis on his residential projects, including his final commission for Brent R. Harris. Miller worked directly with Royston on the project and has continued collaborating with the owners through the years.

February 16 / 2 p.m.

Robert Royston in Palm Springs

A book signing, garden tour, and conversation between JC Miller and garden owner Brent R. Harris about Royston’s final project, an ingenious modernist garden that responds to the distinctive architecture of two important midcentury houses in Palm Springs. The conversation will be facilitated by Robin Karson and Jonathan Lippincott. A copy of just-published Robert Royston by JC Miller and Reuben M. Rainey will be included with admission.

February 16 / 4 p.m.

Lockwood de Forest Jr., Santa Barbara Proto-Modernist

During his all-too-brief career, Lockwood de Forest Jr. experimented with an astonishing range of design ideas in both his gardens and his buildings. Had he lived longer, he almost certainly would have been one of the leaders of the modernist movement in Southern California. In her discussion of his work, LALH executive director Robin Karson, Hon. ASLA, will focus on de Forest’s1926 design for his own house and garden in Santa Barbara, which has recently undergone extensive restoration.

February 17 / 9 a.m.

Welton Becket & Ruth Shellhorn: The Commercial & Retail Projects

LALH author Kelly Comras, FASLA, explores the collaboration of architect Welton Becket and landscape architect Ruth Shellhorn on fifteen projects that helped put postwar Los Angeles on the map. A book signing of Comras’s Ruth Shellhorn will follow.

February 17 / 10:30 a.m.

For more information visit https: modernismweek.com

J. Irwin Miller House and Garden, Columbus, Indiana. Courtesy Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Jane Amidon, author of the forthcoming Masters of Modern Landscape Design series volume on Dan Kiley, and Kenneth Helphand, author of Lawrence Halprin, the third volume in the series, will give presentations based on their books during Modernism Week 2019. Kelly Comras, author of Ruth Shellhorn, will focus on the landscape architect’s work at Disneyland and UC Riverside.  Read more about the event: https://www.modernismweek.com/

ASLA’s Oregon Chapter presented an Award of Excellence to Kenneth Helphand, FASLA, for Lawrence Halprin (LALH 2017), the third book in the LALH Masters of Modern Landscape Design series. 

Read more about the book.

Generous supporters have donated $25,000 to publish The Greatest Beach: A History of Cape Cod National Seashore by Ethan Carr. Thank you, LALH donors!

Read more about the forthcoming book.

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