Small Eden in Los Angeles: Garrett Eckbo's garden (1950-1965)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_zarch/zarch.2021175988Keywords:
Eckbo, Wonderland Park, aluminium, ALCOA, self-experimentationAbstract
For 15 years, the American landscape architect Garrett Eckbo designed and lived in the garden of his modern house in the hills of Los Angeles. The experience in the thoughtful and time-consuming construction of his outdoor room reflects not only the arguments that interested him and help to stimulate the imagery of the Californian domestic garden but also his considerations about the form of the space of this room: the existence of constructions that extended life outside, the exploration of the possibilities of modern art in the garden or the presence of the water in the swimming pool. This garden, and the house, testifies the domesticity of an artificial nature that pursues the renewal of the idea of intimacy in the face of inherited history. The article describes this project and thinks of it from its leaved contribution as a continuous outdoor space construction made of living and inert matter that improves the house. This reflection frames in a speculations on the city of Los Angeles in order to suggest that Eckbo's small Edenic garden, in terms of its particular radical production of a private nature, could be the ember of a latent ecology that helps us in the humanization of the modern city.
Downloads
References
Ain, Gregory. 1950. The Museum of Modern Art-Woman's home companion exhibition house, Nueva York: The Museum of Modern Art. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2746 (consulta el 1 de abril de 2021).
Alexander, Christopher J. 2011. Julius Shulman’s Los Angeles. Los Angeles: Paul Getty Museum.
Álvarez, Darío. 2007. El jardín en la arquitectura del siglo XX: naturaleza artificial en la cultura moderna. Barcelona: Editorial Reverté.
Banham, Reyner. 1971. Los Angeles: the Architecture of four ecologies. Londres: The Penguin Press.
_____.1996. A critic writes: selected essays by Reyner Banham. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Baseth, Timothy. 2011. “Josef Van der Kar. Building Architectural Bridges” Modernist magazine, verano, 2011: 44-53.
Beck, Frederick. 1950. “Why I Live in Los Angeles”, Pageant, febrero, 1950: 70. http://www.oldmagazinearticles.com/1950s-los-angeles-pdf (consultada el 1 de abril de 2021).
Bottles, Scott L. 1987. Los Angeles and the automobile: the making of the modern city. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cuff, Dana. 2000. The provisional city. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Davis, Mike. 1995. “How Eden lost its garden: A political history of the L.A. landscape”, CNS 6(4), Diciembre, 1995, 1-29.
_____. 1998. Ecology of fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. Nueva York: Metropolitan Books.
_____. 2006. City of Quartz. Excavating the future in Los Angeles. Nueva York: Verso.
Eckbo, Garrett, 1937. “Small Gardens in the City” Pencil Points, septiembre, 1937: 573-586.
_____. 1950. Landscape for living. Nueva York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce.
_____. 1962. “Aesthetics (& problems) of Living on hillsides”, Landscape Architecture Magazine, Vol. 52, No. 2, Enero 1962: 105-106.
_____. 1964. Urban Design Landscape. Nueva York: McGraw-Hill.
_____. 1969. The Landscape we see. Nueva York: McGraw-Hill.
_____. et al. 1970. “The designer as anonymous transformer”, Landscape Architecture Magazine, Vol. 61, No. 1, octubre, 16-17.
_____. 1978. Home Landscape. Nueva York: McGraw-Hill. (1ª edición 1956)
_____. 1990. Garrett Eckbo: philosophy of landscape. Process Architecture, 90.
Gebhard, David. 1997. The Architecture of Gregory Ain. Santa Monica: Hennesey+Ingalls.
Hise, Greg y Deverell. William. 2000. Eden by Design. The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Merchant, Carolyn. 2003. Reinventing Eden. The fate of nature in western culture. New York: Routledge, 2003.
McCoy, Esther. 1982. “Garrett Eckbo”, Arts and Architecture [The Perception of Landscape], Vol I, No 4, 44.
MoMA. Exhibition House del MoMA https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2746 (consultado el 1 de abril de 2021)
Padilla, Victoria. 1961. California Southern Gardens. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Rainey, Reuben M. y Miller, J.C. 2020. Robert Royston. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Rose, James C. “Freedom in the Garden”, Pencil Points, octubre, 1938.
Ruscha, Edward. 2002. Leave any information at the signal. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Russell, John Robert. 2001. “Remembering Garrett Eckbo”, Landscape Architecture Magazine, Vol. 91, No. 2, febrero: 11.
Treib, Marc y Imbert, Dorethée. 1997. Garrett Eckbo: Modern Landscape for Living. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Treib, Marc. 1997. Modern landscape architecture: a critical review. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
_____. 2000. “Looking forward to nature” Landscape Architecture Magazine, Vol. 90, No. 12, diciembre, 60-67, 88-90.
_____. 2005. The Donell and Eckbo Gardens. San Francisco: William Stout Publishers.
Van der Kar, Josef. 1949. “Consider the family”. Arts and Architecture, Abril: 29.
