ABSTRACT
The idea of modernism in general, and modern landscape architecture in particular, has been problematized in recent years – since the advent, for instance, of cultural and economic globalization, postcolonial studies and increasing research reports on landscape architectural development in non-Euro-American countries. There is even the possibility, as David Hays puts it, that modernism never actually occurred in landscape architecture.1 He means, perhaps, that there were no formal innovations in landscape architecture during the modern period. This is to be contrasted with American landscape architect Laurie Olin’s statement that the work of the US moderns (Halprin, Church, Kiley, etc.) ‘represents the first truly fresh developments (both stylistically and formally) since the eighteenth century.’2 Hays is suggesting that what formal transitions were made in landscape architecture were derived from earlier innovations in the arts. Olin is saying that the application of these innovations to landscape architecture was in itself a modernist event, a development that could only occur in the modern era and – maybe even only – in America. He is not so much overstating the case as broadening the definition of modernism to include innovations in approaches to social and environmental problem-solving as well as in the practice of landscape architecture itself. We think neither is quite right. What we are interested in here is the sense that these innovations were either made or not made in America and in Europe. Recent scholarship has explored the extraordinary social and formal changes rung in landscape architecture both before and after WWII on both continents. In France, Denmark, Sweden, England and Belgium landscape architecture was becoming modern, just as it was in America.3 So far, landscape modernism has been instantiated in the historical accounts as a Euro-American idea.
