Who was Garrett Eckbo?

Born in Cooperstown, New York in 1910, Garrett Eckbo was raised in California. At age 22, he began to study landscape architecture at Berkeley. After graduation he won a scholarship to the Harvard School of Design, where he became dissatisfied with the rigid nature of Beaux-Arts curriculum. While at Harvard, he became influenced by the work of modernists such as Walter Gropius and other of the Bauhaus school. After graduating he returned to California, and in 1950 published his first (and most influential) book, "Landscape for Living," which artfully blends what Eckbo identified as environmental designs, "five basic types of material: earth, rock, water, vegetation and construction." Garrett Eckbo changed the nature of landscape architecture through his practice and writings, by adapting ideas he learned from modernist architects like Gropius to landscapes. He called for a new approach to landscape architecture that integrated society, ecology and design. This was a departure from the past patterns. He wanted to create patterns "in which people live and play, not stand and look." He published seven books and dozens of articles, establishing himself as the preeminent theorist and reformer in his field.

In 1963, Eckbo became chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Berkeley. He became a founding partner of EDAW (Eckbo Dean Austin and Williams) in 1964, the same year that the Fulton Mall was completed. When Eckbo explained his design for the Fulton Mall, he reflected the importance of agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley; "The plentitude of quiet and moving waters, and of shade and greenery from trees and arbors, symbolizes the bursting vitality of irrigated agriculture in the hot interior valley of the arid west" ("Fresno Mall Revisited," Landscape Architecture.) The Fulton Mall is widely regarded as one Eckbo's masterworks. Other books by Eckbo include "Art of Home Landscaping" (McGraw-Hill, 1956); "Landscape Design" (McGraw-Hill, 1964); and "The Landscape We See" (McGraw-Hill, 1969). Eckbo died in 2000.

Read more about Garrett Eckbo at the Cultural Landscape Foundation