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| Mawson's drawings, poking fun at Art
Nouveau |
The response of British gardens to modern art was exceptionally
slow. In the first half of the twentieth century the overwhelming
popularity of the Arts and Crafts style formed a great wall which
shielded garden designers from the explosion of creative energy
that produced the Modern Movement in architecture and the fine
arts. Since painting had been a vital influence on British garden
design for two centuries it is odd that so few designers peered
over the wall to see what was happening to the other applied arts.
In Europe and America the response of garden designers to modern
art was faster. By 1900 Gaudie had
shown at the Parque
Güell in Barcelona that Art Nouveau, then known in
Britain as the 'modern style', was peculiarly suited to the layout
of parks and gardens, and by 1910 Frank
Lloyd Wright's design for the Robie house in Chicago had shown
that the lines of a modern building could be extended to control
the layout of outdoor space.
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to start of section
The landowning class which commissioned the great British
gardens of the period showed no taste for stylistic innovation in
their twilight hour. Nor is there any reason to think that garden
designers had a significant interest in modern art before 1925. The
Modern Movement was assailed by the leading designers of the day
when it appeared over the skies of England. In, 1916 Thomas Mawson
was still laughing at the 'art nouveau craze' and lectured
on 'the ridiculous ornament and the exaggerated design which this
over-enthusiastic cult produced (Slides Nos. 3 and 4)'. In 1934 Sir
Reginald Blomfield (he was knighted in 1919) wrote a whole book
attacking the modern movement. He stated that 'our younger
generation, trained exclusively in our architectural schools, are
convinced that they are introducting a new era in architecture' and
saw it as his loyal duty 'to do what I can to rescue a noble art
from the degradation into which it seems to be sinking'.
Return to start of section
In 1953, when Peter Shepheard
wrote a book on Modern
Gardens, it was still necessary to look abroad for examples
of private gardens which had been influenced by modern art. His
foreign examples included gardens by Thomas Church and Burle Marx. The only convincingly modern
British garden in the book, Bentley
Wood at Halland in Sussex, was designed by an architect and a
landscape architect who had both emigrated to the United States.
The architect, Serge Chermyeff,
was Russian by birth and also owned the house. The landscape
architect, Chrisopher Tunnard, was a
pioneer of modern gardens in England. The illustrations in
Shepheard's book proved beyond question that it was possible to
design gardens which could stand as totally modern works of art,
but it would be difficult, even today, to fill a book with examples
of wholly modern British gardens.
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| Abstract diagrams, by John Brookes |
The main reason for referring to an 'Abstract
Style is that it draws inspiration from the abstract geometry
of modern art. A subsidiary reason is that modern gardens have been
divorced from the historical and literary references which were the
starting point for all previous styles of British garden design.
This corresponds to the early twentieth century painters' desire to
produce a new art which was objective, analytical and
non-figurative. Since there was a tendency to abstraction in
primitive art it is tempting to name the new style of garden design
after one of the four modern movements in art which have had most
influence on garden designers. One could describe it as the Cubist
style, the Constructivist style, the Neo-plasticist style or the
Expressionist style. My reason for not using any of these names is
that they would imply too close an identification with the somewhat
wordy objectives of a particular group of artists.
Cubism is the parent of modern painting and also the movement
which has had the most profound influence on garden design. Its
starting point is generally taken to be the work of Cezanne and his intention of 'doing over
Poussin entirely from nature'.
Cezanne spoke of art being 'theory developed and applied in contact
with nature' and of treating nature 'by the cylinder, the sphere,
the cone, everything in proper perspective so that each side of an
object is directed towards a central point'. It is evident that
there is a close affinity between this intention and the
Neoplatonic theory of art which, as was discussed in the first
chapter, produced the geometrically organised paintings and gardens
of the seventeenth century.
Between 1910 and 1930 a group of Dutch artists, who descibed
themselves as Neo-Plasticists, developed Cubism into a totally
non-figurative art. The leading figure in the movement was Piet Mondrian. He had painted realistic
landscapes as a young man but came into contact with the Cubist
paintings of Georges Braque and
Pablo Picasso between 1911 and 1914.
At the outbreak of war he returned to Holland and, in association
with Theo van Doesburg, developed a
rigorous non-figurative art. During his Cubist period Mondrian had
given his paintings titles which referred to figurative subjects,
such as The Sea and Horizontal Tree. After
formulating the principles of Neo-Plasticism he used titles which
implied no subject, such as Composition or Composition
with Red Yellow and Blue. The theory which underpinned
Mondrian's work was developed in conversation with M.H.J.Schoenmeakers, a Dutch
philosopher who created a link between the de Stijl movement and
Plato's theory of forms (viz. Chapter 1). As in the seventeenth
century it was believed that art should look upwards from the world
of the particulars to the universal forms. Theo van Doesburg, the
editor of de Stijl magazine, explained the basis of the new art:
As contrasted with traditional painting, where particularisation
was of primary importance, painting in our time considers
generalisation, that is to say the uncovering of the purely
aesthetic in plastic features, as its principle value'. He believed
that art should concentrate on the primary colours and forms, and
'leave the interpretation of stories, tales, etc to poets and
writers .
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| The front cover of the first issue of De Stijl
Magazine, 1917, has a surprising resemblence to a garden plan in
the Abstract Style. |
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| Henry Moore's work has
had a considerable influence on the design of modern planting
and landform. |
The front cover which was used for the first issues of de Stijl
magazine resembles an abstract
garden plan. It was designed by Vilmos Huszar, a founder member of the de
Stijl group, and published in October 1917. The design could be
made into a garden by translating the black and white pattern into
paths, steps, raised beds, pools and stepping stones. Even the
title 'De Stijl', which lies above the design, could be used to
make a paving pattern with dark and light slabs. No such literal
translation of a graphic design into a garden plan has been
attempted but the geometry of Neo-Plasticism has had a profound
influence on the design of paved areas. When working with a
T-square and set square it is easy to attempt Mondrian-type
patterns.
The design of landform and the layout of planting areas has been
more influenced by cubist sculpture. It is normal practice to
execute such designs with a soft pencil or to make a maquette in
clay. Both media lend themselves to the kind of shapes and patterns
which are seen in the work of Jean Arp,
Constantin Brancuzi, Henry Moore, and Barbera Hepworth. They make considerable
use of what might be described as muscular organic curves.
Modern planting design has tended to be non-geometric and
expressive. Designers have considered plants as abstract shapes and
patches of colour, and have used them as a foil to the geometry of
Neo-Plastic and Cubist art. The inspiration for this device is
uncertain but the images which can be formed by overlaying random
biological patterns on a structured geometrical background are
highly characteristic of modern gardens. The two possible sources
for the imagery are Japanese gardens and Abstract Expressionism.
The former are known to have influenced particular designers and
the latter is a movement which has educated us all in the
appreciation of abstract and random patterns.
The diagram of the Abstract style shows a transition from a
rectilinear paved area into a curvilinear planted area. It is
intended for comparison with the previous diagrams but it must be
remembered that it represents a garden of perhaps as little as 0.1
hectares while some of the earlier diagrams showed estates of 1,000
hectares and more. In many cases the modern paved area will be no
more than a patio outside a French window but here the use of 600 x
600mm concrete slabs with prominent joints reminds one of the de
Stijl aesthetic.
England was engaged upon the Italian phase of the Arts and
Crafts style when the first modern gardens were being designed in
Europe. Russell Page looks back on the
British gardens which were made between 1900 and 1930 in his
autobiography. He criticises them for employing 'a ragbag of styles
has nothing to do with real style'. He and other designers were
attracted to the classical gardens of France and Italy by their
abstract spatial qualities.
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to start of section
The beautiful pen and wash drawings in J C Shephard and G A Jellicoe's Gardens of the
Renaissance(1925) reveal the spatial quality of the old gardens
and the authors remark that 'The bases of abstract design, running
through history like a silver thread, are independent of race and
age'. A second book on Gardens and Design, by the same
authors and published in 1927, illustrated a house and garden by
Frank Lloyd Wright and praised him
for grasping 'the colossal latent power that lies behind the
subject'. A series of articles by Jellicoe appeared in
Architects' Journal during 1931 and 1932 . The designs were
classical but the discussion is highly analytical. In 1933 Jellicoe
and Page were commissioned by Ronald
Tree to design an Italian garden at Ditchley Park. The owner specifically wanted
an Italian garden and Jellicoe comments:
I had certainly studied the Italian garden in detail, but except
for abortive designs for a new landscape at Claremont some years previously, my experience
in the actual design and execution of the classics was nil. My
aesthetic inclinations, indeed, were wholly for the modern movement
in art, fostered by teaching at the Architectural Association's
School of Architecture........ Casting aside therefore all thoughts
of twentieth-century art, of Picasso
and Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, I threw myself
enthusiastically into a unique study of landscape history made real
.
Ditchley Park was the last major British garden to be designed
in the Italian style. During the 1930s Jellicoe received a number
of smaller commissions which provided an opportunity to introduce
elements of the Abstract style. The frontispiece to The Studio's
1932 Garden Annual shows a garden by J C Shepherd & G A
Jellicoe with a distinctly modern flavour, and in 1933 Jellicoe and
Page worked together on the design of the Caveman Restaurant and garden in the
Cheddar Gorge. The project was widely illustrated in the 1930s as
an example of modern architecture but only part of the garden was
built.
Return to start of section
Christopher Tunnard was the first British
author to urge a connection between modern art and garden design.
He published an article on Japenese gardens in Landscape and
Garden in 1935 and said that their lack of superflous ornament
has 'a special appeal to the modern mind of all countries'. In 1938
he wrote a series of articles for the Architectural Review
which attracted considerable attention and were republished as
Gardens in the Modern Landscape. It became an important
textbook which is often referred to by garden designers who trained
in the 1950s as 'the only book we had'. Tunnard opens with the
assertion 'A garden is a work of art' and soon reveals himself as a
true disciple of the modern movement. In 1937 he had even
co-authored a manifesto on garden design with an international
comrade. Tunnard and Jean
Canneel-Claes proclaimed:
We believe in the probity of the creative act..... the reliance
of the designer on his own knowledge and experience and not on the
academic symbolism of the styles or outworn systems of aesthetics,
to create by experiment and invention new forms which are
significant of the age from which they spring.
 |
| New Ways, a modern house by Peter Behrens standing on a
ridiculous mock-Arts-and-Crafts rockery. |
Tunnard believed that garden designers should 'return to
functionalism' and he used quotations from Le Corbusier: 'The styles are a lie',
and Adolf Loos: 'To find beauty in form
instead of making it depend on ornament is the goal to which
humanity is aspiring'. Above all he believed that 'The modern house
requires modern surroundings, and in most respects the garden of
today does not fulfil this need'. His point was well made by a
photograph of a crisp white rectangular modern house in
Northampton, by Peter Behrens, which
looks most uncomfortable perched on top of a Jekyllesque dry stone
wall and a semi-circular flight of steps which 'fail entirely to
harmonize with the character of the house'. Many designers agreed
with Tunnard but the public did not
- the Behrens house was in fact the first in England to be designed
in the International Style. The public seem to have looked at
Tunnard's photograph and decided that the garden was delightful but
the house was an abomination.
The kind of garden which ought to accompany a modern building
was illustrated by a photograph of Bentley
Wood at Halland, designed by Chermayeff and Tunnard. It is an
austerely beautiful and entirely modern design. The garden owes
nothing to 'the second stone age with its plethora of flagged paths
and dry walls'. A sculpture in the garden by Henry Moore helped to make another of
Tunnard's points:
The best of contemporary architecture is closely related to the
best of modern sculpture and constructivist painting because
architects, sculptors and constructivist painters are in written or
personal contact with one another'.
This was one of the fundamental principles on which the Bauhaus
School had been founded. It was stated by Walter Gropius in 1919:
Let us create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class
distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsmen and
artist. Together, let us conceive and create the new building of
the future, which will embrace architecure "and" sculpture "and"
painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven
from the hands of a million workers, like the crystal symbol of a
new faith.
The Bentley Wood project became the
crystal symbol of a new faith for British garden designers.
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|
| High Point, Highgate, London - a lofty modern
building with a flat roof designed by Tecton, whose members also
belonged to the M.A.R.S. Group. The constructivist aesthetic of the
building is relieved by the caryatids and the planting. Jellicoe
lived here after leaving his house in Grove Terrace. |
The most important British design school to adopt the new faith
was the Architectural Association (AA) in
London. Tunnard was a member of the Modern Architecture Research
Group (MARS) which was based at the AA and played an important part
in introducing modern architecture to England. He was probably the
author of a 1938 article in Landscape and Garden by 'A
member of the Mars Group' which proclaimed that if 'lofty
buildings, flat roofs, reinforced concrete and a remapping of the
countryside' are 'necessary for the betterment of social
conditions' then members of the Mars Group 'will not hesitate to
advocate them'. For a short time in the 1930s members of the Group
had made it possible to say 'that England leads the world in modern
architectural activity' . Staff and students at the AA were
inspired to create modern buildings with modern surroundings.
Geoffrey Jellicoe, Frederick Gibberd, Peter Shepheard and Hugh Casson all trained at the AA in the
1930s and later became prominent members of the Institute of Landscape Architects (ILA). Jellicoe and
Shepheard became Presidents of the AA and then of the ILA.
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| The abstract water gardens in Harlow New Town, designed by
Sir Frederick Gibberd. |
The future of the Abstract style after World War II lay with the
professional designers who joined the ILA after its formation in
1929. Tunnard left England in 1939 to become a Professor of City
Planning at Yale University but his book was republished in 1948
and had a considerable influence on post-war designers in England
and America. The first major opportunity for British designers came
with the Festival of Britain in 1951. Hugh Casson was the design
director of the Festival and a number of landscape architects were
employed on its gardens. They included Peter Shepheard, Russell
Page, Peter Youngman and Frank Clark. Clark had worked with Tunnard on
Gardens in the Modern Landscape and was the leader of the
only full-time landscape design course in the UK. Youngman ran a
part-time course at University College in London. A number of
photographs of the Festival were included in Peter Shepheard's
Modern Gardens. The hard detailing was clearly influenced by
the de Stijl aesthetic but the way in which it was enlivened by
planting and water-washed stones appears to derive from Tunnard's
analysis of Japanese gardens. Crisp geometry was offset by natural
shapes and patterns.
Many of the designers who joined the ILA before 1939 did so
because of their interest in private gardens. After 1946 they found
that few clients wished to commission garden designs. There was
however a greatly increased demand for landscape designers to work
in the public sector: on housing estates, new towns, reservoirs,
factories and power stations. It was on these projects that the
Abstract style flourished in the '50s and '60s. Such projects lie
outside the scope of this book but are referred to by Tony Aldous
and Brian Clouston in Landscape by Design. There are many
public spaces in the new towns which illustrate the style:, in
Harlow by F Gibberd and Sylvia Crowe,
in Hemel
Hempstead by Geoffrey
Jellicoe, in Stevenage by Gordon
Patterson, and in Cumbernauld by Peter Youngman and William Gillespie.
A number of books which illustrate the Abstract style in private
gardens have been aimed at the general public. In 1953 Lady Allen of Hurtwood and Susan Jellicoe
wrote a book on Gardens for Penguin Books. Lady Allen had
worked with the New Homes For Old group which supported the cause
of modern architecture in the 1930s. The book contained photographs
of gardens designed by Thomas Church,
Garrett Eckbo, C Th Sorensen and other foreign pioneers of
the Abstract style.
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| The Four Faces Urn at Bramham, West Yorkshire,
was used by Sylvia Crowe to illustrate the abstract qualities of
gardens which 'are rooted in the natural laws of the
universe'. |
In 1958 Sylvia Crowe published a
book on Garden Design which contains a masterly analysis of
the abstract qualities of gardens in the chapters on the principles
and materials of design. Her discussion of the Four Faces urn at
Bramham illustrates the analytical nature of her approach and her
belief that 'underlying all the greatest gardens are certain
principles of composition which remain unchanged because they are
rooted in the natural laws of the universe':
The long vista at Bramham Park,
Yorkshire, looks across a pool and the end is marked by a huge urn.
The two do not compete, but are complementary, forming together one
composition. The dominant vertical figure is completed by the calm
horizontal pool which does nothing to prevent the eye travelling
easily on its way to the terminal point.
This analysis contrasts with the eighteenth century
associationist approach of Archibald
Alison, who valued the urn at Hagley because it was 'chosen by
Mr Pope for the spot and now inscribed to his memory', and also
with the nineteenth century stylistic approach of Loudon and Kemp.
Loudon advised that urns and statues should only be placed where
they can be 'viewed in connection with some architectural
production' and Kemp that 'statuary, vases, and similar
architectural ornaments, are the fitting associates of Grecian and
Italian houses, and appear less suitable in relation to every other
style'.. Examples of abstract designs by Sylvia Crowe can be seen
at Fulmar Grange in Buckinghamshire and the Commonwealth Institute
in London.
Return to start of section
John Brookes, who worked for a time in the
office of Sylvia Crowe and Brenda Colvin, is the best known British
designer to have applied abstract principles to gardens. His books
have achieved an unusually wide readership and proved that gardens
can be modern without resorting to the austerity of the house at
Halland. The photographs in his books show warm, friendly, useful
spaces, while his plans and diagrams reveal the abstract
geometrical patterns which have led to their spatial organisation.
Brookes is a very successful garden designer. His own design for
the Penguin Books courtyard at Heathrow is used in Room
Outside to illustrate the point that 'looking at modern
paintings can also help one to see how areas of colour and texture
can be counter-positioned to form a balanced whole'. The design was
generated by a Mondrian-type drawing which was geared to the
modular pattern of the building and then translated into areas of
paving, grass, water and planting. His garden at Denmans is less
strikingly modern, but more
charming. Return
to start of section
 |
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| The abstract pattern (left) and (right) the plan for Penguin
Books' courtyard. Courtesy John Brookes. |
The Penguin Books Courtyard. |
In 1960 G A Jellicoe published the first of his three
Studies in Landscape Design. They are inspiring books and
give examples of the way in which his own design projects have been
influenced by modern artists, including Paul Klee, Jean Arp,
Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. The
Studies were concerned with public sector projects but in
1968 Susan and Geoffrey Jellicoe published a book which examines
modern gardens from a similar standpoint. Jellicoe comments: 'Just
as the mind is responding, in abstract art, to shapes which it
appears to seek and even to crave, so it responds to shapes in
landscapes'. A major opportunity to apply this idea came with an
invitation to prepare designs for the most significant private
garden to have been made in England since the war. Jellicoe
describes his meeting with the client as follows:
My first visit was on 22 July 1980. I remember nearly stumbling
over a Henry Moore sculpture on the floor and observing a Ben
Nicholson over the mantelpiece, with a huge Monet close by and a Graham Sutherland in the offing. I
realised within a few minutes that Stanley Seeger and I were on the
same wave-length in thinking that landscape art should be a
continuum of past, present and future, and should contain within it
the seeds of abstract ideas as well as having figurative meaning.
This conjunction of a designer and a client sharing a passion
for modern art has produced the magnum opus of British garden
designin the second half of the twentieth century: Sutton Place in Surrey. It
contains a Paradise garden based on a serpentine grid with
fountains at the nodes, a secret Moss Garden with two hidden
circles, a Magritte Walk (with urns
from Mentmore), a Miro swimming pool, a
lake designed as the setting for a Henry Moore sculpture and a
marble wall by Ben Nicholson. The latter is a work of great beauty
and represents an artistic ideal which has had an overwhelming
influence on the Abstract style of garden design.
The last word on the Abstract style should come from Tunnard,
though he speaks of 'structure' and a 'grand conception' instead of
'style' - because of his functionalist belief that the styles had
been rendered obsolete. It can be set alongside the descriptions of
the landscape ideal which were quoted in the first chapter and is
expressed with admirable directness:
The author's personal approach to landscape gardening and
planning has not changed. First, an eighteenth century
understanding of "the genius of the place" is necessary. Then the
structure - in which usefulness and aesthetic pleasure must both be
considered. Then materials of only the best quality (when they are
available!) - this is very important, and it will be noticed that
they are put in their proper place, after the grand conception, not
before it. Finally, understanding the wishes of the client, whether
it is a private citizen or a public committee in New York or
London.
Since a dislike of raw concrete is one of the
main reasons for the unpopularity of modern construction it is
instructive to note Tunnard's insistance on the use of 'only the
best' materials
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