Gardens in the Modern Landscape. Christopher Tunnard

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СКАЧАТЬ And that means we should welcome his insistence on cross-disciplinary collaboration between design and planning (essentially recapitulating his own career). He valued also preservation, and came to do so even more after this book was published, and preservation stimulates creative rethinking (“creative urbanism” as it has been called³⁴). Then there is the need to marry function with beauty, for despite his nervousness about that b-word, no landscape architect that I know wants to design ugly places, and there are fresh ways of registering beauty in austere and empathic minimalism—beauty is still the elephant in the room for many landscape architects (and it rarely, if at all, occurs as part of their professional training). In addition, Tunnard was always committed to history, not as an anthology of styles and mechanical forms to be copied, but as an arsenal of ideas. He may have traveled with the “difficult baggage of history and horticulture,”³⁵ but landscape architects still need to know their plants, while an emphasis on landscape and urban history as a resource and stimulus stops designers from reinventing the wheel without knowing it.³⁶

      Notes

1. A portion of a paragraph on “beauty” in 1938 (p. 94) was discarded on p. 93 of 1948. See n. 11 below.

2. Tunnard himself wrote “Modern Gardens for Modern Houses: Reflections on Current Trends in Landscape Design” in the Bulletin of the Garden Club in September 1941, where he saw gardens as “stages,” with “every occupant a player.”

3. Here p. 61. He was still going on about Sharawadgi in his last book, A World with a View: An Inquiry into the Nature of Scenic Values (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978), 76–87.

4. The rearrangement of image clusters is: the 1938 frontispiece moves to p. 68 in 1948; the section on Pain’s Hill gets moved from pp. 25–32 to pp. 27–34 here; plans on different layouts at different periods (1938, pp. 129–32) get moved to pp. 134–37.

5. Thus p. 26 uses an image from “The Garden House” section (1938, p. 170); another garden house from 1938, p. 171, moves to p. 42; a sculpture by Willi Soukop is moved from 1938, p. 180, to p. 98, and a conservatory from 1938 p. 182 to p. 117 here.

6. I am indebted to Lance Neckar, who has published two essays on Tunnard: “Strident Modernism/Ambivalent Reconsiderations,” Journal of Garden History 10 (1990): 237–46, and “Christopher Tunnard: The Garden in the Modern Landscape,” in Modern Landscape Architecture: A Critical Review, ed. Marc Treib (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 144–58. Also the more recent study by David Jacques and Jan Woudstra, Landscape Modernism Renounced: The Career of Christopher Tunnard (1910–1979) (New York: Routledge, 2009). This last announces on its title page “contributions by Elen Deming, David Jacques, Lance Neckar, Ann Satterthwaite and Jan Woudstra,” but the text itself does not identify them individually. It amasses a wealth of new information, somewhat unevenly packaged and not always easy to use.

7. He tried to make sense of his career in a late book, A World with a View. His early curiosity was fueled by the endless books he seems to have borrowed from the Lindley Library of the Royal Horticultural Society, details of which loans are cited by Jacques and Woudstra (see their index).

8. “Tunnard: The Modernist with a Memory,” Landscape Design (October 1987): 20–23.

9. The Art and Architecture of English Gardens (New York: Rizzoli, 1989), chap. 5, “The Modern Movement Garden,” 179–85.

10. 1948, p. 6. This is not listed in Jacques and Woudstra’s checklist of writings, though its text is reproduced on pp. 91–92. But it is extensively commented upon in Dorothée Imbert, Between Garden and City: Jean Canneel-Claes and Landscape Modernism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 113–17; she notes that Canneel-Claes’s name alone appears on the pamphlet, but that the English version “acknowledge[s] the influence of Tunnard.”

11. This deleted section reads: “After discussing the uses of gardens, it is customary to talk about their beauties. We are relieved from the monotony of investigating this relative factor if we accept the fact that beauty is but a by-product of the creative attitude to garden planning. We do not aim at the creation of beauty, although it accepts this quality as a logical accompaniment of the artistic fact. One does not bake bread primarily for the sake of enjoying its flavor, but for nourishment, and the degree of nourishment provided by any work of art is now generally recognized as the only test of its value” (1938, p. 94). He continued his concern with aesthetics in a paper (“The Art of Landscape Architecture”) read at an Ann Arbor Conference on Aesthetic Evaluation, a typescript of which is held in the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania.

12. 1938, p. 98, and with a brief discussion of it on p. 101; p. 93 here.

13. That he “clearly had a mind for theorising” seems dubious, at least for his landscape writings: Jacques and Woudstra, 85.

14. Ibid., 16 and 18.

15. Ibid., 101, which discusses these contacts.

16. Tunnard wrote “Landscape Design at the Paris International Congress: What Other Countries Are Doing,” Landscape & Garden (Summer 1937): 78–82.

17. Jacques and Woudstra, 28. Hermelin is quoted at length in 1938 (pp. 77–78) and in 1948 (p. 76).

18. Jacques and Woudstra, 115. But architectural plants had been a feature that William Robinson, whom Tunnard credits with rudely awakening Victorian gardeners (pp. 55–59), admired in Parisian parks; see William Robinson, Parks, Promemades, and Gardens of Paris (1869), plate XV and the same kind of architectural plant examples illustrated in Jean-Charles-Adolphe Alphand, Les Promenades de Paris (1867–73).

19. A garden by Powell, illustrated in 1938 and 1948 (p. 71), this repeats the well-known design of Guevrekian’s garden at Hyères in France (facing it on p. 70); Hill designed a garden for the British Pavilion at the 1937 Paris show.

20. Cited Jacques and Woudstra, 33.

21. The first two paintings are illustrated in Margot Eates, Paul Nash: The Master of the Image 1889–1946 (London: John Murray, 1973), figs. 89 and 53b, respectively.

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