Drafts by britton shepard
Understanding the urban landscape.
James Rose was one of the founders of Modern Landscape Architecture. His membership in a core gro... more James Rose was one of the founders of Modern Landscape Architecture. His membership in a core group of young landscape architects attending Harvard University placed him in at the center of the field of landscape architecture just as it was beginning to open up to modernist ideas already influencing art and architecture. In the late 1930s Rose wrote a series of short, provocative articles which set forth the essential values of landscape modernism and rejected the historical styles of Beaux-Arts and Romanticism. Written in clear and impactful language, these texts constitute a Manifesto which called for new forms of expression, and for a revolution in the process of landscape design in the modern era.
In addition to his writings on landscape theory, Rose built landscape models that took the form of modern sculpture. These models were, similar to those of other architects’, representations of specific site designs. They were also pieces of art in and of themselves. Rose took the landscape garden to be living sculpture and integrated his own life and his practice with the landscapes he designed. This paper examines the idea that Rose’s models, taken with his writings, represent a design process, and may be understood as a form of landscape language which was often undifferentiated from the sites they represented. This sculptural quality, keenly influenced by Kurt Schwitters’s Merz sculptures, enabled Rose to find new ways to express meaning in the landscape at a human scale, befitting the zeitgeist of America in the Modern Age.
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Drafts by britton shepard
In addition to his writings on landscape theory, Rose built landscape models that took the form of modern sculpture. These models were, similar to those of other architects’, representations of specific site designs. They were also pieces of art in and of themselves. Rose took the landscape garden to be living sculpture and integrated his own life and his practice with the landscapes he designed. This paper examines the idea that Rose’s models, taken with his writings, represent a design process, and may be understood as a form of landscape language which was often undifferentiated from the sites they represented. This sculptural quality, keenly influenced by Kurt Schwitters’s Merz sculptures, enabled Rose to find new ways to express meaning in the landscape at a human scale, befitting the zeitgeist of America in the Modern Age.