An authoritative study of the relationship between architecture and landscape as viewed through the work of five architects.
Reviewer Tim Richardson is a garden critic and regular columnist.
The ‘problem’ with Modernist architecture, from a landscape point of view, has always been a sin of omission: the setting of the building is often considered merely as a green platform, or a quota of woodland to be glimpsed through floor-to-ceiling glass windows.
This book makes the case that leading Modernist architects (as opposed to landscape architects) have engaged with settings imaginatively, even if they have not always ‘designed’ them. Five 20th-century architects are covered in depth: Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Richard Neutra, Alvar Aalto and Luis Barragán.
I did not need much convincing that Wright and Aalto (known for his use of the forest metaphor) had a strong landscape sensibility, although I am more sceptical about Mies’s and Neutra’s engagement with landscape. The author admits that Mies’s seminal Farnsworth House – a glass-walled structure that seems to float above the Illinois woodland – ‘appears inert, immobile and devoid of any appreciation of nature’s textures’. His conclusion, that building and landscape are ‘set in a curiously harmonious opposition’, is insinuatingly persuasive. Less convincing is Neutra’s ‘picture-window’ approach to landscape. The section devoted to Barragán is perhaps the most satisfying. Who could possibly decry Barragán’s vision of the garden as ‘a locus of personal reverie’, or fail to be moved by the pink-walled stable yard at Cuadra San Cristóbal?
The text is well-written, though dense and at times repetitive. But no one is better placed to write this study: Marc Treib has spent his entire career elucidating Modernist architecture and landscape, and it is gratifying that the book does not overly flatter its subject.