HERBERT BAYER

''I believe that the artist must achieve creative control over the whole of his environment.''- New York Times, October 21, 1984

Herbert Bayer was intimately involved in the celebrated Bauhaus school in Germany in the 1920s and 30s: first as a student, and then as one of its directors. He emigrated to the United States in 1938. As an advocate of Bauhaus principles he produced works which expressed the needs of an industrial age, the positive collaboration between business and art, mirroring the advanced tendencies of the avant-garde.

typography by Herbert Bayer, entrance to Bauhaus    image: Wikipedia

The Bauhaus was based on the principles of the 19th-century English designer William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement that spoke of art meeting the needs of society and that no distinction should be made between fine arts and practical crafts. It was also dependent on the more forward-looking principles that modern art and architecture must be responsive to the needs and influences of the modern industrial world and that good designs must pass the test of both aesthetic standards and sound engineering. This Bauhaus style, could also be described as the absence of ornament and ostentatious facades and by a harmony between function and the artistic and technical means employed.

For over 60 years Bayer created pioneering works in painting, sculpture, environmental works, industrial design, typography, architecture, photography, and applied design.  He was truly what can be referred to as “a renaissance man,” one of the few "total artists" of the twentieth century. 

"Metamophosis"1936 photographic montage (image: metmuseum.org)

Marble Garden, 1955 - Aspen Meadows Hotel

In this experimental garden, Bayer introduced modernist imagery into the environment for perhaps the first time. Slabs and blocks of white marble were sourced from a nearby abandoned quarry for this thirty-eight foot square experimental garden that begins to suggests the notion that all gardens are nothing more than three dimensional sculpture. The "Grass Mound" (1955), came to inspire a whole generation of earthworks artists and initiated the ground for ecological design and restoration projects of today.

Sketches for earthworks by Bayer...

Installed in 1982, the "Earthworks" was hyped for its fusion of art and infrastructure, making the installation a powerful precedent for landscape designers, architects, engineers and artists.  A series of sculpted spaces that feel both ancient and modern, the Earthworks’ pure forms of geometry -- cones, circles, lines and berms—are built into the alluvial delta at the mouth of Mill Creek Canyon. Grass and concrete, a wood bridge and steps: these are the materials at work, joined by the natural forces of Mill Creek itself.  According to Landscape Architecture magazine, "the city of Kent, Washington,  through its Arts Commission and Parks and Recreation Department, commissioned this project as a solution to urban stormwater runoff and its resultant soil erosion problems. The environmental artwork was a means of enlivening the plans for a proposed stormwater detention basin and creating an unusual entrance to an existing public park. The city's goals were to control flooding, to restore fish runs, and to create an aesthetically pleasing facility that would contribute to enhancing the park."

Mill Creek Canyon Earthworks 1982 (image: landscapemodeling.org)

previous images: flicker.com

Photo by John Hoge and Nancy Leahy

"Layered Landscape" 1944 gouache on paper (image: aspen journal)

In his commercial graphic design work, he was an advocate of social responsibility in design – products or services that promote positive ideas and behaviors while promoting the company. In 1941, the Container Corporation which produced 90 percent to 95 percent of its cardboard from wastepaper hired Bayer to oversee a series of posters promoting the companies ability to recycle products on a grand scale, linking corporate responsibility with the environment.  

Subsequently, Bayer also oversaw another series of posters linking entitled "Great Ideas of Western Man".

"The things that will destroy America are prosperity at any price, peace at any price, safety first instead of duty first, and love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life."--Theodore Roosevelt. 

From the series Great Ideas of Western Man. 1959 Herbert Bayer 

“In a response to the Earth Day of 1970, the Container Corporation announced a design competition for a trademark for recycling in the spirit of Bayer. The competition was won by a student at the University of Southern California presenting the symbol at the Design Conference in Aspen (Figure 7).87 Now universally known, its history goes back to the Bauhaus ideal for living in harmony with the natural world.”

-Environmental History, Peter Anker  April 2007

original design for recycling (image" wikipedia)

FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) is recognized as the founder of American landscape architecture and the nation's foremost “parkmaker.” Olmsted moved his home to suburban Boston in 1883 and established the world's first full-scale professional office for the practice of landscape design. During the next century, his sons and successors perpetuated Olmsted's design ideals, philosophy, and influence.

Over the course of his career projects

 he designed, established and contributed to scenic reservations (i.e.: Yosemite Valley 1865, Niagara reservation 1887), major urban parks (i.e.: Central Park 1858, Prospect Park 1866) park systems (i.e.: Buffalo Park system, Boston’s ‘Emerald Necklace’, Rochester and Louisville), residential campuses (Stanford University, Hartford Retreat), government building grounds, parkways and site planning for the World’s Exposition of 1893.

Lesser known and spoken of are the designs of country estates for wealthy clientele, of which Olmsted designed a number of.  His greatest private client was the Vanderbilt family and it’s many heirs to the fortune of William Vanderbilt. (Olmsted had actually been a neighbor to William Vanderbilt on Staten Island in th 1840's and was now designing the family mausoleum in that same area.)   Olmsted created the Biltmore estate (beginning in 1888) in Asheville North Carolina for George, the youngest of the eight children. Three of George’s sisters had also engaged Frederick Law Olmsted to design their properties.

One of these sisters was Eliza Vanderbilt who married Dr. William Seward Webb, who left the medical profession at the urging of the Vanderbilt family. Webb was propelled into the finance and railroad industries, eventually increasing his fortune as builder of Adirondack Railway Services. The couple lived in New York City and built an ambitious estate in Shelburne, Vermont, which has survived and become notable for its agricultural, technological and architectural achievements. A working farm, at it’s peak in 1902, "Shelburne Farms" included nearly 4,000 acres of farmland with 300 employees to maintained this estate. Between 1886 and 1902, the Webb’s purchased 32 farms on Shelburne point, amassing all this land situated on Lake Champlain in Northern Vermont, framed views of the Green Mountains in the distance, just south of Burlington. 

Shelburne House

view from house looking east

view from south lawn of house looking west

The architect was Robert H. Robertson, who worked alongside F.L. Olmsted.  Shelburne Farms includes four major building on the site – “Shelburne House” (now an inn) the “Coach Barn,” Farm Barn,” “Horse Breeding Barn  Sheep and “Dairy Barn” -- dairy cattle, horses, pigs, gaming pheasants and poultry were raised on this farm.  As many as 100,000 trees a year were planted to create the sculptural landscape, (Capability Brown would be envious), 20 miles of roads and carriage trails were built.

serpentine road leads through...

woodlands...

opening to a clearing in the distance..

. 

with the house perfectly sited on a hill.

Olmsted brought to this site an organizing concept that separated the farm into three types of spaces: farm, forest and parkland.  He also brought design principles learned from his early European travels and mastered in parks such as Prospect Park, Brooklyn.  

Shelbourne Farm: a (Lancelot "Capability') Brownian landscape via F.L. Olmsted

These design principles, commonly though of as the  English naturalistic landscape tradition of the early 18th century – are broad meadows with occasional clumping of shade trees, undulating hills, rich and diverse woodlands that transition into these meadows, looping roads strategically through the landscape to alternately reveal and obscure views and the appreciation of an expanse of water to reflect the sky.

rolling hills + meadows meets lake

(framed views from house)

Guests would tour the farm and horse operations, enjoy carriage rides, boating on Lake Champlain, croquet or golfing on the estate’ golf course. Presently, the site is designated a national historic landmark and has evolved into a non-profit (supported by significant donations) with a teaching component (environmental education center) working farm and an inn.

**With exception of F.L.Olmsted public domain portrait, all photos ©Todd Haiman 2010

FAMILY IN THE GARDEN

Edith Wharton, Beatrix Ferrand and Mildred Bliss.

Within the last two months I have had the pleasure of visiting both Edith Wharton’s estate “The Mount” in Lennox, Massachusetts and “Dumbarton Oaks” in Georgetown, D.C. 

As I recall both visits and the design of the sites I thought it would be interesting to research some background material regarding the two sites, the property owners and the relationships with and about Beatrix Ferrand.  Beatrix Ferrand was arguably the first female landscape architect of note (although she preferred the term “landscape gardener”) and the lone woman among the founding members of the American Society of Landscape Architects.

The Mount reflects the taste of Wharton and to some degree her indirect influence on the future masterpiece that Ferrand created with the owners Robert and Mildred Bliss - Dumbarton Oaks.  Through Edith Wharton’s social connections, Beatrix was introduced to many of her future clients, among them the owner of Dumbarton Oaks, Mildred Bliss.

Edith Wharton was many things -- writer, socialite, gardener a supreme arbiter of taste.  (She claimed to be a better garden designer than writer!) Among the forty books she authored – best selling novels and collections of short stories, were authoritative works on architecture, gardens, interior design and travel. Wharton is credited with designing the gardens at The Mount, with additional landscape design/architecture by Beatrix Ferrand.  While Edith Wharton was laying out the gardens she was also working on the book “Italian Villas and their Gardens” – a strong Italian influence can seen in the Mount’s landscape design.  According to the Edith Wharton Restoration organization, Ferrand completely designed the maple-lined drive leading to the house and an elaborate kitchen garden (no longer functioning) that occupied the field in front of the stable.

The Mount is essentially a house with a grand terrace built overlooking the Italian inspired gardens.  A broad Palladian staircase leads down from the terrace to gravel walks that descend to a lime walk (linden trees).  This serves as a connecting hallway between the two major garden rooms.  

View of the flower gardens

View of the flower gardens

Views of the giardino segreto from the house and return view looking back at the house. 

The “giardino segreto” was paid for with the proceeds from Wharton's first bestseller, “the House of Mirth.”

dolphin fountain

dolphin fountain

To the right, facing away from the house is the walled garden (or “giardino segreto”).  On the left there is a French-style flower garden with arborvitaes arranged around a pool with Wharton’s dolphin fountain.  Other items of interest include two flights of grass covered earthen steps, which lead up to the terrace, a rock garden, and various other niches. What I found of pure delight was the pet cemetery.

Grass steps

Grass steps leading up to the house

Pet cemetary

As a supreme arbiter of taste within her social circles, Wharton carefully planned the grounds of The Mount. Similarly, Mildred Bliss had a very controlling “hand” in the creation of Dumbarton Oaks.  Bliss’s ideas for the gardens began well before she brought a professional onto the scene. Her ideas were primary to the design of the Oaks. British Landscape Architect Lanning Roper, a friend to both Bliss and Ferrand, has stated that ‘Mrs. Bliss knew from the start what she wanted to create.  She had definite conceptions, some of which she treasured from childhood.” *

Grass steps at Dumbarton Oaks

Both properties/gardens have strong Italianate influence – in the topography built upon, design of the garden rooms and aesthetic within these “rooms.” Historian Walter Whitehead suggests that the pre-existing, rudimentary terracing of the steep slope that Dumbarton Oaks was built upon suggested to Mildred Bliss the siting of many of the great Italian country house of the 16th through 18th centuries.  She was familiar with such renaissance villas both from her extensive travels to Italy and from Edith Wharton’s influential Italian Villas and their Gardensof 1919. *

Plan of Dumbarton Oaks

Several years earlier Bliss had arranged to meet Edith Wharton in Paris after reading her novels and influential articles on interior decoration. Later in her life, Bliss eventually wrote of her admiration for Wharton who had been “her stimulus for nearly forty years.” 

From that meeting in Paris, they consistently traveled in the same social circles – during WWI both sharing France’s highest civilian award for their wartime charitable activities in Europe. 

“Years later when Milded Bliss returned to the United States, she used memories of civilized life in Europe before the war as the model for the home she planned to create.  The Oaks would be based upon the Mediterranean model, first developed by the Romans, in which outdoor spaces, and especially those nearest the house would be treated as rooms – extensions of the interior living areas.” The steep slope at the Oaks suggested an organization along the lines of the Italian Renaissance gardens, with these individual rooms dropping down the hillside in terraces, their character gradually devolving from formal and architectural near the house to informal and naturalistic at the perimeter.” *

Ferrand had the good fortune to grow up in the gilded age with her aunt, Edith nurturing her career that began with her design of the Kitchen garden at the Mount. Wharton was only ten years her senior and in much of my readings, is seemingly just as much a close friend and confidant than niece.  She was introduced to many of her future socialite clients not only by her aunt, but her lifelong dear friend, Henry James.

Interestingly, while Edith eventually introduced and spoke of her niece to Mildred Bliss, the first commission of Ferrand’s career was working with a swampy area on a family’s property in Bar Harbor, Maine.  The property owner was Anna Bliss, Mildred’s mother!  (Mildred was several years younger than Beatrix and in her writings had no recollection of this coincidence.) Twenty-five years later they worked together on Dumbarton Oaks.

*

Dumbarton Oaks, Garden into Art; Susan Tamulevich, Monacelli Press, N.Y., N.Y.

** All photographs ©ToddHaimanLandscapeDesign 2014 New York City

BROWNFIELD REMEDIATION

On the north bank of the Thames River, between North Woolwich Road and Thames Barrier in Silvertown (on the outskirts of London, England) lies one of the finest modern parks in Britain.  The Thames Barrier Park was opened in the new millennium (2000), a regenerated formerely contaminated site that once housed timber treatment plants, petrochemical and acid works for over 150 years on the riverbank. It is a 27-acre site of inner city greenery wedged between two modern housing developments along the riverside.

French designers Alain Provost (designer of Parc Citroen in Paris) and Alain Cousseran of Group Signes teamed up with Brit architects Patel Taylor and Ove Arup to transform this former brownfield site.

A parti diagram of this landscape would be a simple rectangle sliced by a diagonal line.

What you see is a vast carpet of rolling hedgerows and lawn blanketing a space between the railway line and the silver domes (or as locals refer to them –“cockleshells”) of the Thames Barrier (the dramatic engineering structure that prevents the centre of the capital being inundated when floods of water are coming down river, and high tides advancing from the east.)

To remediate this brownfield a significant amount of the soil was hauled off, but the bulk of the materials were simply rearranged to reflect the vision of the design team. This profile was then capped with crushed concrete and a geotextile layer and topped off with imported clean soil to confirm the site's suitability for use.

Fields of wildflowers, a grid network of birches and stretching the length of the park is the largest and perhaps most modernesque sunken garden in London – known as the “Green Dock”.  This simulation of a marine dock is accessible by the public and crossed by two viewing bridges.  The planting is a tidal flow of wave-cut hedges alternating with beds of perennials such as Geranium cantabrigiense, Nepeta (catmint), Papaver (poppies) and more.

A group of local friends regularly play hide + seek in the park

Note the separate trash can for fido waste

**all photos Todd Haiman 2010

LANDSCAPE DESIGN AS SCULPTURE

“The importance of outdoor space I based upon the philosophy that residential site design is based upon the three-dimensional organization of space and not just the creation of two-dimensional patterns on the ground or the arrangement of plant materials among the base of a house.  Space is the entity where we live, work, and recreate.  Consequently all the site elements that make up the outdoor environent, such as plant material, pavements, walls, fences, and other structures, should be considered as the physical elements that define outdoor space.  A residential designer should think of design as the creation and organization of outdoor space and study how these components define and influence the character and mood of space.”

-

Norman Booth, Residential Landscape Architecture

"I like to think of gardens as sculpturing of space: a beginning, and a groping to another level of sculptural experience and use: a total sculpture space experience beyond individual sculptures. A man may enter such a space: it is in scale with him; it is real. An empty space has no visual dimension or significance. Scale and meaning enter when some thoughtful object or line is introduced. This is why sculptures, or rather sculptural objects, create space. Their function is illusionist. The size and shape of each element is entirely relative to all the others and the given space. What may be incomplete as sculptural entities are of significance to the whole." - Isamu Noguchi

Wade Cavanaugh + Stephen Nguyen's, "White Stag" in the Material World exhibition at MassMOCA.  

Am I surrounded by very mature English Oaks?

Following, in a very literal juxtoposition of two images, I've compared a site element (the use of plant material) with a sculptural installation. 

The hedge below is found in Regents Park, London.

Here is an

 Installation 

at the Camden Arts Center

 - 

"Continuous"

 by Anna Maria Maiolino 

**all photos Todd Haiman 2010

NAUMKEAG CONTINUED

Fletcher Steele is known to have exclaimed that “the chief vice in gardens is to be merely pretty." With one of landscape design’s most renowned built gestures – "the Blue Steps,"  Steele has turned vice into virtue.   

From SUNY ESF Fletcher Steele Manuscript Collection

To continue my tour of Naumkeag, we reconveine on the runnel that links the pyramid steps on the upper terrace with the top of the Blue steps.

The concrete stairs are shaded by a luxurious grove of Betula papyrifera (Paper Birches) providing a canopy above the Taxus (yew hedge), native ferns + perennials which provided Mabel Choate a gradual descent to her cutting garden at the base of the hill.  This vaulted Art Deco design uses industrial materials -- cast concrete and painted white pipe which are formed into handrails for the four flights of stairs complementing the natural coloration of the birches.  

The blue coloration of the mini fountain pools underneath each staircase provide an exclamation  and color to the extension of the water flow from the runnel above, which is emphasized sensorially by the sound of tricking water and the reflections within the grottos.

Notice the upright hammered wood logs used as edging for the plant material, then repeated as stone in the mini fountain pool/grotto. (These upright hammered wood logs were also used as the serpentine edging for the Oak Lawn)

Planted at the base, flanking the lower fountain are classic yellow-orange hemerocallis (Tiger lillies) which provide a colorful contrast to the blue fountain/grotto.

Fletcher Steele, Mabel Choate and terrier choosing paint colors! (from Periodhomes.com)

Rose garden – a modernist design to be seen by Mabel Choate from her second story bedroom windows, the rose garden is best viewed from above. Steele painted the railings purple – he considered this color the least obtrusive. The serpentine lines of gravel wind through sixteen beds of Rosa floribunda.  I have read that these curved lines of gravel (originally pink colored) are reminiscent of common motif in chinese art – the imperial scepter.   In this way Steele attempts to provide a link to the nearby Chinese Garden.

At the center of the evergreen garden is a circular pool surrounded by a hedge of Buxus sempevirens (boxwood), which forms the focal point of this garden.  In late July (sorry, these pictures were taken in very early June!) tall, white spires of Cimicifuga racemosa (snakeroot) and Yucca filamentosa (Adam’s needle) make a striking feature against the background of various evergreens.

From SUNY ESF Fletcher Steele Manuscript Collection

If you tour the gardens you typically approach the Chinese Garden by climbing a staircase from the evergreen garden below, transitioning these series of stairs up to the Chinese Garden which has high brick/stone walls, seemingly representative of a Forbidden Palace. Entrance into the Chinese garden is through a zigzag screen, also referred to as a Devil’s screen.  Once inside are treasures that Mabel Choate collected from travels to the Far East, including a pair of Foo Dogs that guard the Temple stairs. Plant material also have an eastern flavor as Ginkgo bilobas (Maidenhair tree), Acer palmatum (Japanese maples) and various Phyllostachys (bamboo) are generously placed throughout this garden.

You may exit the Chinese Garden through the Moon Gate or… glimpse the Chinese Garden from afar through this portal if you were to arrive directly from the mainhouse.  In sheer brilliance, Steele created an intriguing, sensory journey regardless of one’s direction through the landscape.  This garden essentially completed the landscape at Naumkeag.

Ironically the first garden creation, the Afternoon garden was created with a pair of stone chairs that client and designer would relax in. The final creation, which was the Chinese Garden has a pair of wicker chairs placed at the top of the Temple in the Chinese garden for viewing purposes.

*unless noted all photos ©ToddHaiman2014