Remembering John Dixon Hunt (1936 - 2026)

The Weitzman community is saddened by the passing of Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture John Dixon Hunt on September 27, 2026. He was 90.

John Dixon Hunt was one of the foremost writers of his generation on the history and theory of gardens and landscapes. He taught at the University of York, Bedford College, the University of Leiden, and the University of East Anglia before joining the faculty in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Penn in 1994 and served as chair through June of 2000. He served as acting dean of the School of Design from July - December 2003 and earned the status of emeritus professor in 2009. Hunt was director of landscape architecture studies at Dumbarton Oaks, and later the academic advisor to the Oak Spring Garden Library in Virginia.

Hunt's numerous articles and books include The Figure in the Landscape (1976), a catalogue of the landscape drawings of William Kent (1987), Gardens and the Picturesque (1992), Garden and Grove (1986), The Picturesque Garden in Europe (2002), The Afterlife of Gardens (2004), and A World of Gardens (2012). He served as editor of the journals Word & Image and Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, and was the inaugural series editor of Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture (University of Pennsylvania Press). Among the 30+ titles published in the series was his book Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory (2000).

Of Hunt's remarkable productivity during the Penn years, longtime friend and former colleague Laurie Olin says, "While continuing with his own research and production of more books and essays, teaching, and contributing significantly to the PhD program and administration of the school, he solicited and brought distinguished scholars, writers, and practitioners from France, Belgium, England, Germany, and China to the department to lecture, teach design studios, and pursue their work with our students."

Written appreciations may be sent to news@design.upenn.edu for future publication on this page.
 

Laurie Olin
Pratice Professor Emeritus in Landscape Architecture

Amarcord JDH

John Dixon Hunt was two years older than me, which led him to chuff, tease, twit, and mildly harass me in a bantering way like an upperclassman toward one who was a couple of classes below. We first met in 1985 when we were Senior Fellows at Harvard University’s Dumbarton Oaks Garden and Landscape Studies program in Washington, D.C. I’d known of him and his work since 1975 when I discovered Genius of the Place, a collection of readings on the English landscape and gardens he co-edited with a colleague, Peter Willis. The next year he published The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening during the Eighteenth Century, and I learned he had earlier published a book-length critical study of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, an appreciative biography of the 17th century poet, Andrew Marvell: His life and writings, and that in 1981, he’d created and begun editing The Journal of Garden History—today entitled the Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscape to reflect its expanding interests. When I asked him what he was currently working on, he told me it was a book on 17th century English garden and landscape history, which appeared the next year as Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination 1600 - 1750. Also, that year (1981) he created and began editing, publishing, and contributing to another new journal, Word and Image, devoted to the relationship between verbal and visual languages. The man was a tyro, what some call a polymath.

Three years later John moved from being one of the Senior Fellows to the head of the table, becoming the Director of the Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, where he solidified his leadership in the emerging field of landscape history, expanding its symposia and publications with a more global reach, bringing together scholars from different fields and countries, creating a virtual network of researchers, librarians, historians, critics, and educators with broad and interdisciplinary interests in landscape and its history. Next, Bunny Mellon coaxed him into leaving Dumbarton Oaks to take over leadership of the Oak Spring Library in Upperville, Virginia, which had a staggering collection of books, manuscripts, and art from 1400-present. John set about organizing it and producing the first catalogues of its holdings, Oak Spring Sylva, (1989), and Oak Spring Pomona, (1990).

And then the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning in the School of Design (now Stuart Weitzman School of Design) at Penn began to search for a new chairman. The department had transformed the field of landscape architecture under the tenure of Ian McHarg and Anne Spirn with its pioneering intellectual and instrumental development of ecological planning and design; the search committee decided to shift the focus of intellectual and research interest to culture and aspects of the history and theory of the field and to more urban landscape design problems. John was an obvious choice and joined the faculty as Professor and Chairman in 1994. On arrival, given his energy and interest in a new situation, Hunt almost immediately persuaded the University of Pennsylvania Press to create a new series of publications, the Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture, for which he then acted as talent scout and chief editor over the next decade. In addition to soliciting new and original studies, this series also produced long out of print publications and translations of historically important works, unavailable in English. The series currently numbers thirty-eight volumes, many award winning, and is unrivalled in the field. At the same time, while continuing with his own research and production of more books and essays, teaching, and contributing significantly to the PhD program and administration of the school, he solicited and brought distinguished scholars, writers, and practitioners from France, Belgium, England, Germany, and China to the department to lecture, teach design studios, and pursue their work with our students.

Continuing to work after becoming emeritus professor he published a superb volume, The Art of Ruskin and the Spirit of Place in 2021 and Genius Loci, a collection of essays reflecting back upon art, landscape, and design in 2022. His personal productivity was prodigious, and the list of books, papers, articles, and named lectures is truly impressive. For his enormous contribution to landscape history and interdisciplinary scholarship in the visual arts, John received many awards including an Honorary Doctorate from his Alma Mater, Bristol University, and Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture.

With John’s passing, Penn and landscape architecture have lost a dear friend and colleague. He was many things to many people, and I knew him through many phases of his life. He was my editor on three books and on more articles, a mentor, supporter, and inspiration—at times a goad—even my boss for a time. I learned in our first encounters of our mutual interest in poetry, painting, classical music, English, French, and Italian gardens and landscape, which I’d been looking at extensively for several years, and social history in general. I wasn’t surprised to discover that while an undergrad at Cambridge University, where he received his BA and MA, he founded, edited, and contributed to a journal (PAWN) which was an assault on another journal that students of F.R Leavis, a doyenne of literary criticism, had created. As someone once remarked about architecture, literary criticism is a blood sport in England, and John, a proud and fierce Yorkshireman who loved hiking in the Peaks District and skiing in the Alps, was unafraid of academic debate, even combat. Later when he came to Penn, we taught a History/Theory course together for nearly a decade, every Monday morning at nine through Spring semester. It consisted of a scholar and a practitioner prowling through the legacy of built work and the literature and critiques of it, ranging from classical antiquity to the present and from Europe through Asia and America. Alternately, one of us would deliver a talk on a place, design, or topic, after which the other would react and comment on what the other had said or shown. We had our debates, differences, and congruences which we unabashedly put on view for the students. It was fun and dead serious. I was never certain what they thought (despite universally high marks on their subsequent course evaluations) but we had an enormously stimulating time, often contributing to ongoing work of us both. John had a magnificent sense of humor, a quick and sharp of wit, and was fierce and unflinching intellectually. He was also generous, especially with students and young teachers. He was a teacher's teacher and produced many—as far as I know, every one of his PhD students that I met or worked with has a good teaching position today in one of several countries and different continents. I will point out that he could be irascible and prickly, but those of us who knew him didn't take offense, it was his intolerance for sloppiness or for some crime against good thinking or behavior that set him off. Having published at length on the picturesque (Gardens and the Picturesque: studies in the history of landscape architecture), he was intolerant of the frequent lazy misuse of the word, as much as we were both troubled by the use of the word ‘informal’. One of my favorites of his activities was the making of lists of all sorts—he often kept a note pad with him to jot down phantom titles for books, essays, or poems he would make up, whether for real future projects or imaginary, and not infrequently, humorous works. I will greatly miss him.

James Corner (MLA'86)
Emeritus Professor of Landscape Architecture, Founder of Field Operations

JDH

A titan in our field. An absolute master. John certainly knew his history of landscape architecture, but it was his penchant for cultural ideas and erudite argument that elevated him from historian to genius.

As Laurie Olin so beautifully describes in his remembrance here, John's intellect and insistence on excellence have left us an extraordinary body of books, essays, lectures and ideas, each advancing the intellectual dimensions of our still small and fragile field. That work continues to shape the discipline, and it demands to be revisited, rethought and repositioned again and again.

Inspired by John's work, I wrote an essay in his honor for a 2009 symposium devoted to his ideas, titled "Hunt's Haunts: History, Reception, and Criticism." Rereading it this morning with fresh eyes, I found one paragraph that captures for me why his writing matters so much:

"Hunt's haunts are those remarkable places and ideas where content concentrates, lingers and accrues. The combination of physical, material places with cultural ideas points to the unity of theory with practice, of design with reception, and of experience with intellect—all dialogues that we strive for in the best of our work. That such experiences might also haunt our imaginations is perhaps the highest calling of art, and in gardens, as Hunt has so eloquently taught us, we might find the Greater Perfections."

John's work taught me the importance of clear articulation, constructive argument and critical thinking, grounded in history and expressed through good writing. His demand for excellence remains a touchstone and inspiration for me to this day. His books sit prominently on my shelf, well-read, thumbed through and annotated throughout. Now, with his passing, I intend to take them down again, reread them, and discover what potential new futures might be born from their remarkable historical stories.

Beyond his exemplary body of work, John was one of those rare people whom it was an outright privilege and delight to meet. Encounters with him were always dramatic, sometimes terrifying, sometimes humorous, but always edifying and memorable. He was pure Shakespeare: witty, contrary, quick and shrewd! And I admired the man himself: the dapper tweed suits, polished shoes and colorful bow ties, the wiry grey hair and wry smile, the bearing of an English gentleman. What a character! It was an absolute pleasure to have known him and to have enjoyed his warm company and intellect.

I admire you deeply, JDH, and I will miss you.

Ron Henderson (MArch/MLA'95)
Professor, IIT School of Architecture

John conspired to trick me into writing my first book. Co-conspirator, Fritz Steiner arrived to teach workshops at Tsinghua University, where I was then teaching, and announced to me that, "John said you were writing a book!" That was news to me. The Gardens of Suzhou was published two years later by the University of Pennsylvania Press -- as have numerous important texts on Landscape Architecture -- in the Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture series that JDH founded. I learned that he could commit people, like me, to things they don't even know they committed to. Then, somehow, I became grateful that I was the subject of conspiracy. He was a "conniver" who was up to no good on one hand and absolutely dedicated to the greater good - primarily rigorous scholarship - on the other hand. His academic family tree of scholarship in landscape architecture and garden history is venerable and broadly spreading.

Thaïsa Way
Professor and Director, School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture, The University of British Columbia

Landscape history might predate the scholarship of John Dixon Hunt, but his influence on the breadth and the depth is what defines the field today, even along the pathways he did not take. He was one of the most probing of scholars I have known and it showed in his critique of language, his curiosity about words and their origins, and his skill at creating beautiful prose. His work offered the grounds for scholars such as myself to ask different questions of design and designed landscapes and to investigate place and land in a multiplicity of ways. At Dumbarton Oaks he elegantly moved landscape history away from the clutches of traditional art history to a deeper engagement with design and the making of place. His scholarship offered both delicious and challenging cake-crumbs along untraveled routes for so many of us. He understood the history of garden design as a serious and significant area of study which made room for scholarship on women and gardens as well as gardens and religion, gardens and the environment, gardens and culture, to name a just a few. Some of us might remember a discussion at an early meeting of the Landscape History Chapter where he shared that he taught history backwards challenging us to rethink about the nature of teaching history (and whether we faced the students or the blackboard while lecturing).For me, he was also a mentor and colleague. JDH published my first essay, one on the work of Marjorie Sewell Cautley, in Studies in the History of Gardens and Other Designed Landscapes after he took the time to hear me give a graduate student talk. Some twenty years later I called him to talk about plans to develop a new monograph series at Dumbarton Oaks. His work was a reference during my dissertation research and again as I taught landscape history for two decades.  He will be missed, but we are extremely lucky to have so many of his thoughts on paper, ready to share with the next generation.

Sonja Dümpelmann
Professor and Chair of Environmental Humanities, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen

JDH jumped the fence and forged a path. Garden and landscape history would not be the same without his work which provided one of the most important foundational pillars for younger scholars. My first encounter with his work was as a doctoral student in Germany. He gave a lecture–and never had I heard anybody lecture like this before: so eloquent and elegant, and content that clearly was shaping and defining the field. No wonder that when given the chance to organize a conference as a postdoc, I invited him for a keynote lecture and was thrilled he accepted. As a young faculty in the United States, his books were among the go-to works for preparing course materials and lectures, and there is hardly any syllabus—regardless of course focus—I ever prepared that did not list at least one of his texts. John Dixon Hunt published some of my first articles and trusted me early on when he invited me to edit a volume of the Cultural History of Gardens. His urgency prompted a fast turn-around! Besides his extraordinary work, of course, I will also remember him for letting a group of us landscape history folks know in the early 2010s that he was experimenting with “teaching history backwards,” prompting the inevitable comment: “You mean, facing the wall?” And there it ultimately was, the beginning of a smile.

David Leatherbarrow
Emeritus Professor of Architecture

Tough love is not a term that is commonly used to describe a professor’s conduct toward his or her students, but I think it suits John Dixon Hunt’s manner perfectly well. Over the half-a-century that I knew him, I saw it often, not only in his behavior toward students at all levels but also toward me. In 1983 he was one of my two Ph.D. examiners. Mid-way through the two-hour long defense—and defense it was—he remarked that what I’d suggested about the birth of the informal garden in England contradicted what he had written in not one but several publications. Unstated in the remark but plain in the voice was a serious charge of oversight. I replied as calmly as I could that I was very familiar with his account, having read all that he had written, but felt nevertheless that my arguments were correct. His rejoinder stunned me: “Yes, what you’ve written is correct, and for that reason I want to publish it in my journal but now let’s get back to the exam.” I’ve never forgotten that exchange and have used it as a model for working with my own students. Hunt’s mental toughness was no less obvious in his scholarship than his teaching, toughness with himself and love for his subject. As a scholar, he could be described as locomotive, with the important qualification that he laid down his own tracks, first through the landscape of English literature, then garden history, and lastly through what I think he’d allow me to call landscape theory. New territories were thus opened, and many have followed the lines of inquiry he set down, including me. I count myself as one of his students, also a teaching colleague—at Penn we taught a course on theory together for a couple of years—and as a close friend. When I saw him a month ago, we agreed on the aptness of the first line of Alexander Pope’s autobiographical poem: “This long disease my life.”  Though physically weaker, his mind was as razor sharp as it had always been, his fearless curiosity undiminished, and his mischievous smile no less disarming. As each of us continues with our work in coming months and years, I imagine we will find ourselves asking at critical moments: “John, what do you think?”

Witold Rybczynski
Emeritus Meyerson Professor of Urbanism

A historian friend once pointed out that unlike the professions that had their own specific tools—architects draw, engineers calculate, scientists measure—the historian has only language. Yet in capable hands that can be more than enough. It was always a pleasure to read John’s work, listen to him lecture, or simply have a conversation. He spoke in paragraphs, sentences, and commas and semicolons. What he had to say was always interesting, sometimes funny, often sardonic. He did not suffer fools. Although I contributed a book with Laurie Olin to John’s Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture series, and John and I shared space in a recent Rizzoli book on Planting Fields, it was as a Chestnut Hill neighbor that I knew him best. Conversations on the SEPTA ride home, or more convivially, talks at his house over one of Emily’s ever so dry martinis. 

I raise my glass. To John.

Catherine Seavitt
Meyerson Professor of Urbanism and Chair of Landscape Architecture

“All These Ithacas”

This has been a season of the Odyssey, and a re-reading of Homer is apt as we mourn the loss of our great Prospero, John Dixon Hunt. I’ve known John Dixon Hunt best through his books — books upon magical books, authored, edited, introduced — reminding us that though we continue to expand our landscape discipline, its center and nexus will forever remain the garden: an inscribed place at once conceptual, literary, and real. JDH brought to our pragmatic discipline of earth and social sciences the heart and soul of a humanist — aptly landing at our University of Pennsylvania as a man of letters in the then-School of Fine Arts in 1994, with a Fine Arts Library whose finest collection was Shakespeareana, a gift of the architect’s brother, Horace Howard Furness. One of John Dixon Hunt’s first books was A Critical Commentary on Shakespeare’s “The Tempest," published by Macmillan and Co. in 1968, directly addressing the themes of power, colonization, magic, and reconciliation that were so resonant in the late 1960s, and ever-so-present again today. Years earlier, as an undergraduate English major at King’s College, Cambridge in 1954, JDH encountered E. M. Forster at tea. They shared an interest in both Lawrence Durrell’s Justine and the modern Greek poet, C. P. Cavafy — very few of Cavafy’s poems had been translated into English at the time, and JDH resolved to study modern Greek in order to read the poems in the original. Cavafy’s poems, like Prospero’s books, are magical, and JDH loved this magic. JDH’s own description of Cavafy’s poetry in the June 1957 issue of Granta, then Cambridge’s undergraduate literary magazine, might well have described his own future writing: “Between the historical poetry and the personal lies much of the most charming of Cavafy’s work. Its dominant quality is the precision of the flashes of insight and of their expression. He is a realist by nature and what interests him is the actual play of life.” May our journeys to all our Ithacas be as long and as adventurous as those of John Dixon Hunt.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

(excerpt, C. P. Cavafy, Ithaka, 1911)

Jody Beck (PhD'09)
Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture, University of Colorado Denver

I often tell people that I I got my PhD somewhat by accident.  This is only partially true.  I was on the verge of starting my own architecture practice, but I also wanted to teach and so returned to higher education for what I thought was going to be a one-year graduate degree in the history and theory of architecture. And then I took a course on the history of landscape architecture with John Dixon Hunt. I was so inspired by his teaching and the vast reach of his mind and how he understood the role of landscape architecture in the world that nine years later I completed my doctorate under John’s supervision.    Little did I know when I registered for that course that I put myself on a track to switch intellectual fields, move where I hung my hat from practice to academia, and eventually chair a department of landscape architecture myself.

It is amusing from this vantage point to recount the first thing that I remember John Dixon Hunt saying to me.  He had asked a question within his lecture on the Garden of Eden.  I don’t remember his question, or my response.  But I do remember what he said next; “You’re very clever. Now tell me why you’re wrong.”  And that kicked off an intellectual relationship that would span over three decades.  Because of course I was, decidedly and demonstrably, wrong.

John tolerated no sloppy thinking or bad writing.  When we met to discuss the first stab I took at a dissertation proposal, he sharply threw my paper on the floor and told me that it was “polystyrene prose” with a somewhat sputtering indignance that only a Brit could muster.  I couldn’t help but laugh, and agree.  And that was the day my education as a writer truly began.  Perhaps my education as a thinker as well. John was consistently and exceedingly generous with his time, and the intellectual investment he made in my writing and thinking is a model that I aspire to match as I support my own doctoral students.

His unwavering support and his critical but encouraging commentary did not stop with graduation. His response to an early version of a chapter from my latest book on the role of landscape in utopian thinking was, roughly, that he supposed it made sense and it was clear enough – but it seemed like the landscapes it would generate would be so terribly dry and joyless.  He asked me if there could be delight in these landscapes as well.  I have taken that demand for joy to heart, not only in the revisions to that book, but in how I teach and what I have prioritized in subsequent writings.

Even more than any of the acerbicism for which he we is rightly well known, that demand for joy and delight in the landscape – that twinkle he would get in his eye when he described a place that he dearly loved – is what I will remember him for.  His imperative for joy in experiencing the world will ever show through in his writings for those of us who knew him well and who can see that look in his eyes behind his sentences that we will always still read.

Michael Leslie
Former Professor of English, Rhodes College, Memphis

I first met John when I joined the English Department at Bedford College, University of London, in 1979. He was a senior member and I was the lowest form of academic life. However – and he never believed this – I knew his work already through the anthology he’d created with Peter Willis, The Genius of the Place (1975). We hit it off and in that first Christmas vacation I received a letter from him (we sent letters in those days) saying he was founding a new journal and needed a number two. He wrote, ‘I have to make a choice between someone who knows a lot but who I find personally difficult, and someone I like but who is pig-ignorant. And I have indeed chosen you’. So I became involved with the Journal of Garden History, now Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes.

He read and improved my work and did me the enormous compliment of getting me to read his; and so it continued for decades. In 1985 we founded Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry, which he continued to edit long after I’d moved on; and eventually, in 2016, we were joint series editors of the 6-volume Cultural History of Gardens. He contributed essays to two other volumes I edited; I contributed an article for his final issue as editor of SHGDL. It was a long history of collaboration for which I am more grateful than I can express. We disagreed and we teased each other. When I became a Senior Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks he said, ‘If I’d realised it might come to this, I’d have thought harder before recruiting you to the Journal!’ I called him ‘Squire’, which infuriated him.

John could be robust, but this was always in the service of driving up the quality of thought and writing. He had a giant influence on my life, professional and personal. Our encounters were always full of debate, disputation, drama; but equally full of humour and affection. It was a privilege to have known him as a guide and colleague, but above all as a friend.

Anita Berrizbeitia
Interim Chair and Professor of Landscape Architecture, Harvard University Graduate School of Design

John Dixon Hunt – A Tribute

John Dixon Hunt had a profound impact on generations of landscape architecture faculty and students and, through his extensive body of scholarship, will continue to do so for years to come.

I first met John when I joined Penn’s LARP faculty in 1998, while he was serving as department Chair. Over the years, we had numerous discussions that continue to shape my research. We shared a deep disdain for the reductive language typically used in landscape architectural writing at the time, such as "informal" or "natural." I sought to develop a broader and more precise language to describe designed landscapes in relationship to contemporary cultural discourse; he practiced History (with a capital H). John insisted that, even within the context of a design school, history should be pursued for its own sake, never instrumentalized as design theory necessarily was. I came to understand he regarded his writing as an art.

As a colleague, John was a generous interlocutor and mentor—challenging, intimidating, and competitive, yet witty, genuinely kind, and always respectful. As a sign of support, he often attended conferences where I was presenting, and when he could not attend, he would write me a note in advance. I still find myself passing on the insights he offered me as a junior faculty member on academic life, research, writing, and teaching.

John once recounted how, as a child, he helped his father, an actor, memorize his lines. His theatrical presence, whether in a lecture hall or during a conversation in his office, was worthy of an accomplished thespian and the special event of the day. He tried, unsuccessfully, to turn me into one: “When you speak to someone, imagine you are grabbing them by the collar of their shirt.”

During the summer, formalities receded, and an unstoppable joie de vivre took over. He cultivated his garden, was an accomplished cook, and always enjoyed good Venezuelan chocolates and rum, which Luis and I happily shared with him.

It was my great fortune and privilege to know JDH as a colleague and friend. A teacher’s teacher, he will be terribly missed.