Garrett Eckbo

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

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.

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."

Eckbo began to take architecture classes with the former Bauhaus director Walter Gropius, who was then head of the architecture department while continuing to take classes in the landscape architecture department.

Gropius and Marcel Breuer introduced Eckbo to the idea of the social role in architecture, the link between society and spatial design.

Eckbo was also influenced by the works of several abstract painters, including Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy and Kasimir Malevich.

Eckbo would convey a sense of movement in his designs by the layering and massing of plants as inspired by the artists' paintings.

After receiving his MLA degree from Harvard in 1938, Eckbo returned to California where he worked in the San Francisco Office of the Farm Security Administration.

He designed camps for the migrant agricultural workers in California's Central Valley.

He applied his modernist ideas to these camps attempting to improve the workers living environments.

"'The Grapes of Wrath' was our bible," he said of John Steinbeck's 1939 novel about farmers dislocated by the dust bowl.

"The F.S.A. was a remarkable experience because it had the really creative atmosphere a public agency can have if it's not inhibited by some frustrating force."

Those major organizational plantings of Chinese elms, cottonwoods, mulberries, sycamores and other hardy species were softened with magnolias, oaks and olives for shade and almond and plum trees for color.

The landscape architect sees nothing extraordinary about going to such trouble for the dispossessed.

"You were conscious of social problems that existed, and you tried to think of ways to improve them," he said.

During World War II, the agency shifted its focus to housing for defense workers.

Mr. Eckbo designed site plans for 50 such settlements on the West Coast.

But peace brought a different public attitude.

"There were products we wanted to buy, things we wanted to do, a great outflow of energy, demand and desire. Prosperity is bad for morale," he said.

"It makes us greedy."

Mr. Eckbo had a leading hand in planning what many scholars consider the postwar period's finest subdivision scheme, the 256-acre Ladera Housing Cooperative near Palo Alto.

But the project was never fully realized without Federal Housing Authority financing, which was probably withheld because the community was racially integrated.

In 1940, Eckbo joined with his brother–in-law, Edward Williams to form the firm Eckbo and Williams.

Five years later Robert Royston joined the firm.

In 1946, Eckbo resettled in Los Angeles to take advantage of its growing opportunities for private practice.

Never a puritan, he threw himself with gusto into defining the landscape of a new American dream.

"L.A. is larger, looser, a place of freer movement socially than the Bay Area," he said.

"The years I spent there were the best of my professional life."

Mr. Eckbo's eagerness to experiment during the 1950s was epitomized by his theatrical Beverly Hills swimming pool design for the owner of Cole of California, the bathing suit company.