Lance M. Neckar, Professor Landscape Architecture, University of Minnesota
In the 1930s, Christopher Tunnard (1910-1979) proposed a landscape to resolve a central paradox of modernist condition: the autonomous aesthetic impulse and the broader historical and cultural force. He melded the subjective and the objective in the construction of a landscape design approach that mapped to three shibboleths of modernism: objectified, science-based functionalism and its formal consequences; directness of materiality, an 'empathic' construct which would be composed in 'occult balance;' and the use of principles of modern art, especially surrealism and constructivism. American readers of these ideas in the book,Gardens in the Modern Landscape (1938) would transform education, professional writing, and practice in landscape architecture in the postwar period. This American landscape architecture embraced the essential rightness of American-isms with an uneasy nodding to an international style and collaborative model of practice in projects framed by big architecture. Innovation became an explicit article of American postwar modernist culture. Shiny, new, aesthetics of Tunnardian derivation deployed across the American landscape regardless of context. Largely rejected by Americans, Tunnard's European obsession with history, his fourth subliminal, if elitist, informant, would have added a messy realm of considerations. In a larger frame, in an era of globally contesting 'isms' after World War II the ideological embrace of new landscape in the United States would enable a smoothing-over of complex phenomena and contexts. Landscape architects could not (and generally did not try to) heal the cultural chasms caused by poverty, racism and other inequalities or lurking ecological tipping points that lay just below the sculpted surface of material modernity. The conflation of inherent subjectivist/objectivist paradoxes in Tunnard's approaches shaped the American scene across education, writing, and work in landscape architecture. In the meantime, Tunnard compounded these paradoxes by adding one of his own. He left landscape architecture, reconsidered modernism, and adopted the academic mantle of planning. As the modernist post-Tunnardian conflation has begun to be unpacked, three distinct fields of American landscape architecture (which are only slightly overlapped in the academy) have emerged. The first is the field that can generally be described by the relatively broad, but decisively conservative post-modern-isms of the regular profession, the American Society of Landscape Architects and its magazine; the second is the place where all 'isms' and their very existence is contended, the elite academy, whose members toil in the field of knowledge reinvention (the new innovation imperative), sometimes extending this work into (mostly) elite practice; and the third, a contested and messy field of new hybrid-isms and non-isms where a motley crew of agents of transdisciplinary, social, cultural, economic and ecological change sometimes include, and are increasingly led by, landscape architects.
