Guest-blogger Ted Cleary, ASLA, of Studio Cleary Landscape Architecture offers
insights into midcentury modern garden design.
Today’s post is the first of his “Case Study Gardens”.
MCM enthusiasts will
be familiar with Arts & Architecture magazine’s legendary design feature
known as the “Case Study House Program”. From its inception near the
war’s end in 1945, through 1966, the CSH Program showcased innovative modernist
designs, many of them modest, others more grand, meant to address the postwar
housing needs of the typical American family. Like the CSH examples, some
unbuilt, others still existing, these Case Study gardens strive to offer solutions you can
apply to your own outdoor spaces.
If you own a great midcentury modern home, it’s natural to want a landscape design that’s
period-appropriate. But of course, MCM
homes make up just a small percentage among a sea of traditional styles across America. What then if your heart really craves
“modern” when your home says “neo-Georgian”? Do you have to accept either the
typical suburban-y landscape look, or a more elegant version of it echoing
Classical formal gardens?
This is a design dilemma that I think is becoming fairly common
among home buyers whose house style
doesn’t really represent their tastes as well as they’d like; instead, it was
just the only option because a home builder decided it’s what the “market
wants”. I always marvel at how you can’t
walk into a high-end furniture store these days without tripping over a Noguchi table or
Eames lounge chair, and yet so many homes’ outward appearances seems to pretend it’s occupied either by the colonial
governor of Williamsburg or an 18th-century French nobleman.
While I’m inclined to encourage that the architectural style of
the building should drive the architectural style of its surrounding landscaping, there may be
justifiable exceptions. Among modernist landscape architects practicing in the
‘40s and ‘50s such as Garrett Eckbo, I’ve been surprised to find that some of their clients’ homes were not your
quintessential modernist design. When
I’ve closely studied certain gardens I particularly admire, beyond their most
iconic photographs other
seldom-published photos from different angles reveal adjoining residences of
quite traditional styles. When designing
a garden, I believe the key is to seek out the essence of the architectural
details, rather than slavishly duplicate them in a
literal way.
The owners of this large home are a perfect example; it might be
best described as “French Provincial”, but their modernist taste was clearly conveyed to
me both by her spoken desires and the collection of contemporary art throughout
their rooms. When I first arrived, it was a bit of a head-scratcher to figure out how I
might make these two seemingly incongruous directions “speak” to each other in
some complementary way.
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| existing layout |
The existing lower level’s outdoor space was an
inadequately-small bulbed-out patio, with a formless curving wall wrapping
around one side of it to hold back the significant grade change. But the
clients had an ambitious program, for both an active family-with-kids and for
grownup entertaining: full outdoor kitchen and cocktail bar, and various bells
& whistles that are part of many clients’ wish-lists such as pizza oven,
TV, outdoor heater, and some kind of fire feature. A pool was also mentioned as a possible
future-phase item. The challenge was to
accomodate this program, using a very modernist vocabulary, in some creative way that nestled a design between the
traditional home and its abrupt grade change.
Can homeowners with a modernist sensibility, but a very traditional home, find an outdoor space they’ll
love? Tune in again next week, when we
look at the design solution.
All images credited to: Studio Cleary
Landscape Architecture.
Written by: Ted Cleary, ASLA
http://www.houzz.com/pro/tedcl/studio-cleary-landscape-architecture
