ABSTRACT
The completion of Garrett Eckbo’s Alcoa Forecast garden in 1959 created quite a stir. Eckbo’s Harvard years would be a key period for developing his comprehensive views of landscape architecture and for realizing the social role for the profession. The Bay Area’s design talent produced a host of laudable projects for the program, for example, William Wurster’s housing in Vallejo and Eckbo’s own contributions to several community plans. Eckbo’s ability to derive impressive formal innovation from client need is well illustrated by two swimming pools accompanying garden designs from the mid-1950s.More a philosophy than a portfolio, the book proposed “total landscape,” a concept by which Eckbo sought “quality” in the relationship between human and nature. In 1963, Eckbo accepted the call by his alma mater to return to the Bay Area to chair the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of California at Berkeley.
