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(b Ramsgate, Oct 23, 1865; d Brighton, Feb 10, 1945).

English architect, interior designer, garden designer and writer . He was articled to Charles Davis (1827–1902), City Architect of Bath, from 1886 until 1889 but learnt little and was largely self-taught. In 1889 he started his own practice on the Isle of Man, where he built a number of buildings, including his own Red House, Douglas (1893). He was a leading member of the second-generation Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain and was among the first to build on the simpler, more abstract and stylized designs of C. F. A. Voysey, a refinement of the ideas of William Morris, Philip Webb, R. Norman Shaw and others from the period 1860–90. From about 1890 until World War I, the Arts and Crafts Movement, as represented by Baillie Scott, Voysey, C. R. Ashbee, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Parker & Unwin and others, became the most important international force in architecture, interior design, landscape and urban planning. The work of these architects influenced Adolf Loos and Josef Hoffmann in Austria, Joseph Maria Olbrich and Peter Behrens in Germany, Eliel Saarinen and others in Scandinavia, and Frank Lloyd Wright, Irving Gill, Greene & Greene in the USA....

(b Vichy, April 1, 1907; d Vichy, May 30, 1989).

French architect, urban planner and writer . Immediately after his studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he presented designs for a ‘garden city for intellectuals’ at the Salon d’Automne of 1934. He then entered the Institut d’Urbanisme of the University of Paris, where he was much taken with the teaching of the architectural historian Marcel Poëte (1866–1951). He established a reputation in 1937 with La Rome de Mussolini, in which he unreservedly celebrated il Duce’s urban development policy. He worked with Jacques Gréber, the chief architect of the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne of 1937, and in 1941 he published Problèmes d’urbanisme, in which he set out for the first time a global manifesto linking both spatial and social factors. He was particularly opposed to the planning principles on which Le Corbusier based the sunburst layout of his Ville radieuse, but he commended the functionalist designs of Alexander Klein to a French audience in ...

(b Banbury, Oxon, Sept 15, 1901; d June 30, 1997).

English landscape architect and writer. She attended Swanley Horticultural College in 1920–22 to study fruit farming, but after travelling through Italy she was inspired to design gardens. After returning to England in 1926, she became a pupil of the landscape gardener Edward White (1876–1952) and also worked for Cutbush Nurseries, Barnet, in 1939. From 1945 she practised landscape architecture in London with the assistance of Brenda Colvin. Small projects eventually led to her appointment as landscape consultant to the new towns of Harlow and Basildon (1948–58) and the Central Electricity Generating Board (1948–68). In 1964 she became the Forestry Commission’s first landscape consultant, a post she held until 1976 and where her work broke new ground. Crowe regarded aesthetic and ecological principles as inseparable and she believed that forestry planting should relate to land form. As a result of her influence at the Forestry Commission, landscape considerations were taken into account whenever land was acquired, so that natural rather than artificial boundaries would be used. In ...

(b London, Nov 29, 1843; d Godalming, Surrey, Dec 8, 1932).

English garden designer and writer. Best remembered for her books on horticulture and the gardens she made with the architect Edwin Lutyens, she first trained (1861–3) as a painter at the Kensington School of Art, London, and (c. 1870) under Hercules Brabazon Brabazon. Private means allowed her to concentrate on learning one art or craft after another, from embroidery to stone-carving. In 1882 she began contributing horticultural articles to magazines and advising acquaintances on planting schemes. She met the young Lutyens in 1889 and introduced him to some of his first important clients. He designed Munstead Wood, Godalming, for her in 1896. True to her Arts and Crafts background, Jekyll promoted the cottage-garden style of old-fashioned flowers, informally planted; her opinions and expertise made her a household name. Her first book, Wood and Garden, illustrated with her own photographs, appeared in 1899. Her schemes for about 300 gardens are known (numerous plans, Berkeley, U. CA, Coll. Envmt. Des., Doc. Col.), of which about 100 involved ...

(Alan)

(b London, Oct 8, 1900; d July 16, 1996).

English landscape designer, urban planner, architect and writer. He was educated in London at the Architectural Association School (1919–24). His book Italian Gardens of the Renaissance (with J. C. Shepherd), derived from student research, was published in 1925, the year in which he qualified as an architect. He soon established his practice in London. In the 1930s he was instrumental in developing the Institute of Landscape Architects (now the Landscape Institute) as a professional body. He taught at the Architectural Association School (1928–33), becoming its Principal in 1939. His projects of the 1930s include the village plan (1933) for Broadway, Hereford & Worcs, a model document under the Town and Country Planning Act of 1932, and, with Russell Page (1906–85), a pioneer modernist restaurant and visitors’ centre (1934) at Cheddar Gorge, Somerset. Important garden designs of these years include Ditchley Park (...

(b Danzig [now Gdańsk, Poland], March 20, 1881; d May 30, 1935).

German landscape architect and writer. After a horticultural apprenticeship and training in Hamburg he joined the landscape-gardening firm of Jakob Ochs in 1902. He rose quickly from technician to principal designer. In 1913 he left to become self-employed. Migge had joined the Deutscher Werkbund in 1912 and through designing a number of public parks in Germany he began to develop his theories about the role and function of landscape gardening. He wrote extensively on the subject, and in such books as Jedermann Selbstversorger (1918) and Die Gartenkultur des 20. Jahrhunderts (1920) he explained his ideas about the socialization of urban green space, of transforming the city into an autonomous entity without exploiting the surrounding countryside. From 1920 he put his theories into practice first with his Sonnenhof project at the artists’ colony at Worpswede, and then through his involvement with the housing reform movement. During the 1920s and early 1930s he designed the landscaping for many of the Modern Movement housing estates of the Weimar Republic. He worked with such architects as ...

At the turn of the millennium, public art was an established global art genre with its own professional and critical discourse, as well as constituencies of interest and patronage independent of mainstream contemporary art. Art criticism has been prodigious regarding public art’s role in the ‘beautification’ of otherwise neglected social space or in influencing urban development. Diversity and differentiation are increasingly the hallmarks of public art worldwide, emerging from city branding strategies and destination marketing as well as from artist activism and international art events and festivals. The first decade of the 21st century demonstrated the vast opportunity for creative and critical ‘engagement’, activism, social dialogue, and cultural co-creation and collective participation. New public art forms emerged, seen in digital and internet media, pop-up shops, and temporary open-access studios, street performance, and urban activism, as well as architectural collaborations in landscape, environment or urban design.

Intellectually, the roots of contemporary public art can be found in the ludic and the architectonic: in the playful public interventions epitomized in the 1960s by the ...

(b Budapest, July 25, 1881; d Budapest, Feb 23, 1928).

Hungarian architect, landscape designer, teacher and theorist. He first studied painting under Simon Hollósy in 1898, then attended the Hungarian Palatine Joseph Technical University, Budapest, and became an assistant to his professor, Samu Pecz. In 1906–8 in France he studied landscape design, which he then taught in the State Horticultural Institute, Budapest. Rerrich’s architectural works are characterized by freely worked plans, a conservative style and moderate ornamentation. He did not follow any specific tendency, his talents enabling him to harmonize his buildings with their natural and architectural environments. His early works, chiefly rural schools, reflect vernacular architecture, while his aristocratic town houses and gardens show the influence of the Baroque. More reflective of 20th-century trends are large residential blocks in Budapest, for example at Arena Street (1911–12) and Hengermalom Street (1927). His chief work is Dóm Square (1928–30), Szeged, which was commissioned both to complement the Romanesque Revival Votive Church begun (...

(b Philadelphia, PA, Nov 5, 1869; d Bermuda, March 29, 1950).

American landscape architect. A pioneer in her profession, Shipman was called “the dean of American women landscape architects” by House and Garden magazine in 1933. She maintained an office for over 40 years and designed some 600 projects, mainly residential, throughout the USA.

Born Ellen McGowan Biddle in Philadelphia, she was the daughter of Colonel James Biddle and Ellen Rose McGowan, both from prominent American families with considerable wealth. She grew up on Army posts on the far corners of the Western frontier until the age of 18, when her father took a post in Washington, DC. She was educated at finishing schools and enrolled for one year at Radcliffe College (1892–3). She did not stay, instead marrying Louis Shipman, an up-and-coming young playwright, in 1893. The couple soon settled in the arts colony of Cornish , NH, among an extraordinary group of painters, writers, architects, sculptors and patrons associated with the American Renaissance (...

[SAH]

Professional organization devoted to the study of architecture worldwide. Founded in 1940 by a small group of students and teachers attending summer session at Harvard University, the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) has grown into the leading professional and scholarly organization in the world concerned with various aspects of the built environment. With a membership of around 2700, composed of architectural historians, architects, planners, preservationists, students, and other individuals interested in the subject, as well as nearly 1000 institutions worldwide, it publishes a scholarly periodical, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, whose topics range from antiquity to the present day around the world; a monthly electronic Newsletter; and a multi-volume book series of detailed guides to the architecture of the individual American states, Buildings of the United States (BUS). The Society sponsors an annual meeting, held each year in a different part of the USA or Canada, or occasionally elsewhere, where members present scholarly papers, discuss these papers and other architectural topics, explore the area via a series of tours, and learn of the award of a number of prizes for notable accomplishments in the field, as well as designation of Fellows of the Society for lifetime contributions to architectural history. These include four book awards, the Alice Davis Hitchcock, Spiro Kostof, Elisabeth Blair MacDougall, and Antoinette Forrester Downing, for architecture, the built environment, landscape architecture, and preservation, respectively; the Philip Johnson Exhibition Catalogue Award; the Founders’ Award for the best article published in the ...

(Marius)

(b Germany, 1893; d 1979).

Danish landscape architect, teacher and writer. After training as a horticulturist he worked in Copenhagen from 1914 to 1922 as a draughtsman for the landscape architect, Erik Erstad-Jørgensen (1872–1945). From 1922 he ran his own practice, and from 1924 to 1929 he collaborated with another Danish landscape architect, G. N. Brandt (1878–1945). He became a lecturer in landscape gardening at the Kunstakademi, Copenhagen, in 1940, and as the first professor of landscape and garden architecture from 1954 to 1963 he devised training courses for the modern landscape architect. He evolved his theories in discussion and collaboration with Povl Baumann, Ivar Bentsen, Kaare Klint, Kay Fisker, Aage Rafn and Steen Eiler Rasmussen. Carl Petersen’s concepts of ‘Contrasts’ and ‘Textural Effects’ were the basis of their aesthetic views.

Sørensen aimed to avoid monotony, to create harmony and unity, and to give significance to landscape through spatial experience and sculptural forms. His materials were earth and plants. He learnt his art by visiting European gardens and saw the new ideas put into practice in Frankfurt am Main and Berlin. Through his prolific writings, his teaching and close collaboration with leading architects he had a profound influence on the cultivation of physical surroundings, on parks and woods, roads and motorways, architecture and environment in housing developments, residential suburbs and country-house gardens. The circle and the oval were Sørensen’s favoured forms. He saw in the Greek amphitheatre the divine idea projected down upon earth, citing as an example the Viking settlement at Trelleborg in Scandinavia. His own garden, created in ...

(b Rochester, NY, June 7, 1885; d Rochester, NY, July 16, 1971).

American landscape architect. Steele spent his childhood in Pittsford, NY, in the farmhouse that had belonged to his grandparents. Early memories reveal a strong love of nature and an appreciation for landscape values that would guide his future designs. After high school, Steele entered Williams College, where he honed his acerbic wit and also made many close friends, some of whom became important clients. Against his parents’ wishes, he enrolled in the newly formed graduate program of landscape architecture at Harvard University in 1901.

Steele was not impressed by the “old maids” at Harvard, preferring instead Denman Ross, a painter and art theorist with whom he maintained a close personal and intellectual relationship for decades. After one year, he dropped out of the program to take a paid position in the office of Warren H. Manning, who assigned him to supervise development of several large projects. After a three-month grand tour (funded partly by Manning), Steele opened a Boston-based practice in ...

(b ?Yorks, Dec 25, 1865; d London, March 27, 1950).

British landscape designer, architect and writer. He was the nephew of the landscape designer William Brodrick Thomas (1811–98) and trained (1886–9) as an architect in the London office of G. F. Bodley and Thomas Garner (1839–1906). The success that he and fellow architect Reginald Blomfield had with The Formal Garden in England (1892), a polemical history (illustrated in part by Thomas) that popularized the formal gardens of the 17th century and the early 18th, led to a number of large commissions in the 1890s, establishing him as one of the leading revivalists of the time. He was less busy during the Edwardian era, and his activities in Russia and elsewhere during World War I spelt the end of his career. Most of the dozen or so commissions for gardens that Thomas obtained were from new owners of Tudor manor houses bought cheaply during a glut in the country-house market; these owners required him to restore or enlarge their houses, and to complement them with sympathetically designed revivalist gardens inspired by English Renaissance and Baroque formal examples. His finest gardens of the 1890s are at Athelhampton, Dorset (...