ABSTRACT
Landscape architecture lagged farther behind architecture in concerning itself with those aspects of aesthetic development explored in the fine arts. The occasional forays into the classical landscape vocabulary virtually completed the palette. In California, landscape architects took up the call and placed the emphasis on the “natural”—even three trees in a row could be regarded as formalistic heresy. If one used the formal aspects of modernist architecture as a comparison, by extension a modern landscape should also express its own production. Ironically perhaps, it is the architects who have advanced many of the most interesting current landscape ideas, extending their domain to include once again the garden or the greater limits of the site. The chapter suggests that the true modernist landscape had never fully developed and that landscape architects had tended to apply only a vocabulary drawn from modernist painting to designs for planting and paving.
