Thinking a Modern Landscape Architecture West & East

The complex story of modern landscape architecture remains to be written, as does its precise definition. Thinking a Modern Landscape Architecture, West & East,
written by one of the field’s most prolific and insightful authors,
provides a rare cross-cultural study that examines the written and
design contributions made by two of the movement’s most influential
early protagonists: Christopher Tunnard (1910-1979) in England – and
later the United States, and Sutemi Horiguchi (1896-1984) in Japan.

Tunnard’s pioneering manifesto, Gardens in the Modern Landscape,
first published in 1938, laid out the thinking and provided the
direction for a landscape architecture engaged more strongly with
contemporary life, adopting ideas from modern art as well as the
historical gardens of Japan. Rather than a book, it was the architect
Horiguchi’s 1934 essay The Garden of Autumn Grasses that
initiated a new direction for garden making in Japan, with a considered
and artful use of seasonal plants and a stronger connection to the
modern architecture it accompanied. Unlike Tunnard, who sought
inspiration and sources in contemporary art, Horiguchi looked to the
eighteen-century Rimpa School of painting for insights into the
composition of the new garden by carefully placing individual plants
against a simple background. Although the two theorists-practitioners
never met, Tunnard’s interest in Japan, and use of Horiguchi’s work as
illustrations, links them in a shared quest for a landscape architecture
appropriate to their times and respective countries.