Books By Garrett Eckbo - Author

Garrett Eckbo (1910-1996) was one of the most highly respected and influential American modernist landscape architects. He worked assiduously to overthrow the Beaux-Arts system of landscape design and to develop an approach that would address the social and economic challenges of the modern world. Eckbo rejected the centrality of nature as a psychological and spiritual source of inspiration, criticizing the "palliative" introduction of nature into cities in parks designed by Olmsted and other nineteenth-century landscape architects and arguing instead for a scientific method that would provide a model for a new approach to landscape design entirely free of preconceptions. His built work was influenced by modernist European architecture, modern art, and vernacular landscape tradition. As a principal of Eckbo, Royston & Williams, he helped introduce socially responsible as well as sustainable design practices to Southern California, gradually expanding his practice to form EDAW, one of the largest and most i