Michael S. Smith Classic by Design

The treasures of mid-century American architecture have long been celebrated. Less appreciated has been the landscape design that provides the framing for these masterworks. But more than frame, landscape architecture is an art worthy of the spotlight, particularly at mid-century, when the notion that “gardens are outdoor spaces for people to live in” was championed and brought to the fore; now gardens and landscapes are not just external attributes to the house but a continuation of it and its living spaces in a relationship of symbiosis, with its pools and terraces, its winding lawns, and its partly enclosed room-like spaces flanked by brick or stone or plantings in a range of colors and forms.

Approximately seventy-five mostly residential projects are thoroughly documented and recounted. Landscape architects whose work is featured include Thomas Church, Lawrence Halprin, and Garrett Eckbo, among others. Highlights include the dramatic surrounds of Richard Neutra’s Perkins House in its Pasadena hillside setting and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Marin County Civic Center, where environment and building comingle in an extraordinary modernist vision of the future made real.

This book is both a wishful gesture toward a realignment of building with nature and a must-have for anyone with a visceral appreciation for a designed environment understood as an integrated whole. Ultimately, the book underlines the fundamental importance of gardens and landscape design, intended in the widest possible sense, for the quality of living of all individuals.