GARDENS
IN THE MODERN LANDSCAPE
PENN STUDIES IN LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
John Dixon Hunt, Series Editor
This series is dedicated to the study and promotion of a wide variety of approaches to landscape architecture, with special emphasis on connections between theory and practice. It includes monographs on key topics in history and theory, descriptions of projects by both established and rising designers, translations of major foreign-language texts, anthologies of theoretical and historical writings on classic issues, and critical writing by members of the profession of landscape architecture.
The series was the recipient of the Award of Honor in Communications from the American Society of Landscape Architects, 2006.
GARDENS
IN THE MODERN LANDSCAPE
A Facsimile of the Revised 1948 Edition
Christopher Tunnard
With a new foreword by John Dixon Hunt
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
Copyright © 1948 Christopher Tunnard
New foreword copyright © 2014 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tunnard, Christopher.
Gardens in the modern landscape : a facsimile of the revised 1948 edition / Christopher Tunnard ; with a new foreword by John Dixon Hunt. — 1st ed.
p. cm. — (Penn studies in landscape architecture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Facsimile reprint. Originally published: New York : Scribner, 1948.
ISBN 978-0-8122-2291-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Gardens. 2. Landscape gardening. I. Title. II. Series: Penn studies in landscape architecture.
SB472.T8 2014
712—dc23
2014017083
CONTENTS
Foreword to the facsimile edition by John Dixon Hunt
Gardens in the Modern Landscape (1948 edition)
FOREWORD
to the Facsimile Edition
Gardens in the Modern Landscape, first published as a book in 1938 and again ten years later, is an important moment in discussions and promotions of modern gardens and landscape architecture. A foreword for this reprint requires two things: to situate the text, for those who come to it for the first time and even for those who know it (since Tunnard’s writing emerges from a whole cluster of interrelated concerns); and, second, to assess how it survives today, both as a historical document and as an invitation to continue thinking about landscape architecture.
What is reprinted here is the second edition of 1948 (to which page references are given, unless otherwise stated). The changes made to the first are, in fact, modest. The wording of the text itself remains almost the same in both editions,1 though the typeface is smaller and the images are now located in slightly different places on the page (so anyone citing pagination in these editions needs to specify which is being used). What gets altered textually in the second are mainly the substitution of a new and expanded “Foreword,” the addition of a section on “Modern American Gardens” and, to conclude, an essay on “The Modern Garden” by Jospeh Hudnut, Dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, originally published in the Bulletin of the Garden Club of America.2 Tunnard’s original section on “The Oriental Aesthetics” is now merged with the section on “Asymmetrical Garden Planning” (and the subsection heading deleted), he expands the footnote on “Sharawadgi”3 and inserts a new opening paragraph at the start of “A Solution for Today” (p. 143). The Contents page of the 1948 book itemizes the different subsections of the chapters, not just their titles; “The Case for Community Gardens” in 1938 becomes simply “Community Gardens” in 1948. There is no change in the bibliography (though doubtless the wartime restrictions on paper made new publications less likely).
But image clusters are augmented, with some examples appearing in different places (the result, perhaps, of having to devise new signatures for a newly set text).4 The plan of a garden arrangement by Garrett Eckbo at a Farm Security Administration camp in Texas is added on p. 142 in 1948, but with no commentary on it in the text. Some extra images are brought into the 1948 edition—notably a cluster of examples on “Architect’s Plants” (pp. 118–25), which replaced the planting plans for Gaulby (1938, pp. 118–22), and others at the end of the section on “Art and Ornament” that illustrate modern interpretations of traditional forms. The biggest change is the dropping of a long final section on garden decoration for Grottoes, the Garden House, Gates & Fences, Garden Seats, Sculpture, and Conservancies (though two pages on “The Grotto” survived, now coming after “Reason and Romanticism” in 1948; a few of the other images from 1938 on garden decoration are used elsewhere in 19485).
More interesting, I believe, is less the movement, such as it is, between the two editions and the juggling of image placement than the transference of Tunnard’s original articles in the Architectural Review (AR), printed between October 1937 and September 1938, into a book published in late December 1938 by the Architectural Press, an in-house extension of the Review. While articles can stand alone, having a certain self-sufficiency that does not ask readers to situate them within a larger argument, once those same articles are gathered into a book (even if the texts are unaltered) they acquire and need a more consistent argument that moves between and sustains them. Illustrations, too, function differently in articles from their inclusion in books (even if the images are identical); new images and certainly the different placement of them in a fresh edition respond to a reading of the whole book, because its readers will be able to consult the entirety of images rather than just the ones attached to a single article; this again should make the whole more coherent than the individual parts as well as enlarge its concept and impact (indeed, Tunnard does move clusters of images around in the two editions, perhaps to make a better impact; but he still allows many images in the book to do their own work, accompanied by captions but with no extended commentary in his main text).
Thus the transference of articles into a book does not always make for a coherent argument. While the 1948 edition, with Tunnard’s self-criticisms and retractions, new additions, and the introduction of Hudnut’s essay, is clearly something of an uneasy hold-all of rich and not always