Thinking a Modern Landscape Architecture, West & East: Christopher Tunnard, Sutemi Horiguchi

(Hardback)

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The complex story of modern landscape architecture remains to be written, as does its precise definition. Thinking a Modern Landscape Architecture, West & East, written by one of the field's most prolific and insightful authors, provides a rare cross-cultural study that examines the written and design contributions made by two of the movement's most influential early protagonists: Christopher Tunnard (1910-1979) in England - and later the United States, and Sutemi Horiguchi (1896-1984) in Japan. Tunnard's pioneering manifesto, Gardens in the Modern Landscape, first published in 1938, laid out the thinking and provided the direction for a landscape architecture engaged more strongly with contemporary life, adopting ideas from modern art as well as the historical gardens of Japan. Rather than a book, it was the architect Horiguchi's 1934 essay The Garden of Autumn Grasses that initiated a new direction for garden making in Japan, with a considered and artful use of seasonal plants and a stronger connection to the modern architecture it accompanied. Unlike Tunnard, who sought inspiration and sources in contemporary art, Horiguchi looked to the eighteen-century Rimpa School of painting for insights into the composition of the new garden by carefully placing individual plants against a simple background. Although the two theorists-practitioners never met, Tunnard's interest in Japan, and use of Horiguchi's work as illustrations, links them in a shared quest for a landscape architecture appropriate to their times and respective countries. Lavishly illustrated with 150 historical and contemporary photos and drawings, Thinking a Modern Landscape Architecture, West & East: Christopher Tunnard and Sutemi Horiguchi offers the first compressive study into their thinking, landscape designs, and consequent influence on landscape architecture in the years that followed.

Reviews

"Marc Treib, Honorary ASLA, is one of the more productive and penetrating historians of modern landscape architecture, and here he brings his acumen to the development of two threads, one English and one Japanese, to enrich the understanding of the exchange between Eastern and Western design foundations in landscape.... In this beautifully illustrated book, Treib again invigorates the histories of modernist landscape design." --Landscape Architecture Magazine
As designer, editor, and often photographer, Marc Treib presents the biographical accounts of Tunnard and Horiguchi as a series of well-organized sub-chapters in Thinking A Modern Landscape Architecture, West and East. He candidly recognizes the difficulties of research and attribution caused by the paucity of design documentation and the fact that very little survives of the built projects of either man. Footnotes are minimal but informative, the bibliography extensive, and the index more than adequate for cross referencing the two stories. With this book, Treib has a made an important contribution to the history of landscape architecture.--Martin Segger "The Ormsby Review"

Author Bio

Marc Treib is Professor of Architecture Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley, and a historian of landscape and architecture who has published widely on modern and historical subjects in the United States, Japan, and Scandinavia. Recent books include Landscapes of Modern Architecture: Wright, Mies, Neutra, Aalto, Barragn (Yale, 2017); Austere Gardens: Thoughts on Landscape, Restraint, and Attending (ORO, 2016); and The Landscapes of Georges Descombes: Doing Almost Nothing (ORO, 2018).