Landscape Exhibitionism: How Early Modern Landscape Exhibitions Influenced Eckbo, Royston, & Williams in Palm Springs

In 1937, the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA) organized an exhibition showcasing contemporary landscape architecture. The show was the first of its kind and was inspired by the New York Museum of Modern Art's groundbreaking 1932 "Modern Architecture" exhibition, which introduced the International Style and European modernism. The exhibition offered an opportunity for landscape architects to showcase their work, dream, and experiment even further, using models, drawings, and photographs to share their fresh approach with an eager public.   

 

After World War II, further exhibitions at SFMOMA and the Marin Art and Garden Center showed how contemporary landscape design in California had matured. Landscape architects Eckbo, Royston and Williams, one of the nation’s leading modernist landscape design firms during the postwar period, frequently participated in these exhibits. The vignettes prepared for exhibitions provided the firm opportunities to create three-dimensional examples of spatial design ideas unencumbered by site or program. These experiments would later find their way into the built work.  This presentation will explore their work during these years and share rarely seen photographs and drawings of their landscapes in Palm Springs. 

 

Landscape historian Steven Keylon lives in Palm Springs, California, and writes and lectures about Southern California’s cultural landscapes. He is editor of Eden, the Journal of the California Garden & Landscape History Society and the author of The Design of Herbert W. Burns (PSPF, 2018) and The Modern Architecture of Hugh Michael Kaptur (PSPF, 2019).  He also serves as vice-president of the Palm Springs Preservation Foundation, is on the boards of DocomomoUS/SoCal and Beverly Hills Heritage and a founding member of The Cultural Landscape Foundation Stewardship Council.

 

JC Miller, ASLAA, is a California licensed landscape architect with over 25 years of experience that includes analysis, planning, design, and construction documentation for a wide variety of project types.  His extensive portfolio of built work includes education facilities, public parks, civic spaces, religious environments, historic landscape documentation and preservation, and residential gardens. A recognized expert on postwar landscape history, he writes and speaks frequently on mid-century California gardens and public spaces and the designers that shaped them.  He is co-author of Robert Royston (University of Georgia Press in association with LALH, 2020) the first full biography of the landscape architect Robert Royston, in whose office Miller worked for over a decade, and as a principal, assisted Royston in the design and execution of his final projects.  millerstudiola.com