Modern Garden

The treasures of mid-century American architecture have long been celebrated in photography, print, and even film. Less appreciated, though no less worthy of attention, has been the landscape architecture that frequently provides the framing for these masterworks. But much more than a frame, landscape architecture is an art in its own right worthy of the spotlight. The Modern Garden presents the very best of this remarkable period through the lens of its great photographers. Approximately seventy-five mostly residential projects, built during the Mid-Century Modern period across the United States and Canada, are thoroughly documented here and recounted with a consideration of structural integration joining building and site. Landscape architects whose work is featured include Thomas D. Church, Lawrence Halprin, Garrett Eckbo, Paul Laszlo, Robert Royston, Douglas Baylis, Theodore Osmundson, James Rose, Geraldine Knight Scott, among others. Highlights include the dramatic surrounds of Richard Neutra s Perkins House in its lush Pasadena hillside setting, which suggests nothing so much as a modernist Eden, and Frank Lloyd Wright s Marin County Civic Center in San Rafael, where environment and building comingle in this extraordinary modernist vision of the future made real. This book is conceived to be both a wishful gesture toward a realignment of building with nature and a must-have title for anyone who has a visceral appreciation for a designed environment understood as an integrated whole. Ultimately, it is the book s aim to underline the fundamental importance of landscape design, intended in the widest possible sense, for the quality of living of all individuals.

Pierluigi Serraino is a practicing architect, author, and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area.