Thinking a Modern Landscape Architecture, West & East

The complex story of modern landscape architecture remains to be written, as does its precise definition. Thinking a Modern Landscape Architecture, West & East, written by one of the field’s most prolific and insightful authors, provides a rare cross-cultural study that examines the written and design contributions made by two of the movement’s most influential early protagonists: Christopher Tunnard (1910-1979) in England – and later the United States, and Sutemi Horiguchi (1896-1984) in Japan.

Tunnard’s pioneering manifesto, Gardens in the Modern Landscape, first published in 1938, laid out the thinking and provided the direction for a landscape architecture engaged more strongly with contemporary life, adopting ideas from modern art as well as the historical gardens of Japan. Rather than a book, it was the architect Horiguchi’s 1934 essay The Garden of Autumn Grasses that initiated a new direction for garden making in Japan, with a considered and artful use of seasonal plants and a stronger connection to the modern architecture it accompanied. Unlike Tunnard, who sought inspiration and sources in contemporary art, Horiguchi looked to the eighteen-century Rimpa School of painting for insights into the composition of the new garden by carefully placing individual plants against a simple background. Although the two theorists-practitioners never met, Tunnard’s interest in Japan, and use of Horiguchi’s work as illustrations, links them in a shared quest for a landscape architecture appropriate to their times and respective countries.