Table Of ContentLandscape Design in Color
Architects, landscape architects and urban designers experiment with color and lighting
effects in their daily professional practice. Over the past decade, there has been a
reinvigorated discussion on color within architectural and cultural studies. Yet, scholarly
enquiry within landscape architecture has been minimal despite its important role in
landscape design.
This book posits that though color and lighting effects appear natural, fleeting, and
difficult to comprehend, the sensory palette of built landscapes and gardens has been
carefully constructed to shape our experience and evoke meaning and place character.
Landscape Design in Color: History, Theory, and Practice 1750 to Today is an inquiry into the
themes, theories, and debates on color and its impact on practice in Western landscape
architecture over the past three centuries.
Divided into three key periods, each chapter in the book looks at the use of color in
the written and built work of key prominent designers. The book investigates thematic
juxtapositions such as: natural and artificial; color and line; design and draftsmanship;
sensation and concept; imitation and translation; deception and display; and decoration and
structure, and how these have appeared, faded, disappeared, and reappeared throughout the
ages. Richly designed and illustrated in full color throughout, including color palettes, this
book is a must-have resource for students, scholars, and design professionals in landscape
architecture and its allied disciplines.
Mira Engler studied landscape architecture and architecture. She is an Emerita Professor
of Landscape Architecture at Iowa State University. Her first book Designing America’s
Waste Landscapes and Cut explores societal and professional attitudes toward waste and the
design of dumps and sewage grounds. Her second book Cut and Paste Urban: Landscape: The
Work of Gordon Cullen explores image making in landscape and urban design in the postwar
consumer culture era through the drawings and writing of Gordon Cullen, respectively. She
currently studies immersive landscapes and virtual media culture.
Landscape Design in Color
History, Theory, and Practice 1750 to Today
Mira Engler
Front & Back Covers. Photographic collage of Woburn Abbey gardens by Humphry Repton
(back layer), Union Bank Plaza by Eckbo, Dean, Austin, Williams (middle layer), and Davis
Garden by Martha Schwartz Partners (front layer). Photos: Mira Engler
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 Mira Engler
The right of Mira Engler to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 9781138343955 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781138343962 (pbk)
ISBN: 9780429438790 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780429438790
Typeset in Perpetua and Helvetica Neue
by polytekton, Ames, Iowa, USA
Publisher’s Note
This book has been prepared from camera-ready copy provided by the author.
To
My Blue Garden
My grandchildren Eden and Asher who fill my life with color
and
All those who chase away darkness and fill the world with light
Preface ix
Introduction 1
Part I Pre-Modernism 11
From Painting to Landscape
The Landscape Painting Genre: Privileging Color over Line
Autumn Colors: The Painter’s Favorite
1 Structural Color: Uniform Verdure, Humphry Repton (1752–1818) 19
Landscapes: Nature the Colorist
Artifacts: Color as Ornament and Social Code
Drawings: Color and Consumer Appeal
Red Books: Status and Brand
Brandsbury, Middlesex, UK, 1789
The Gardens of Ashridge, Hertfordshire, UK, 1813
2 Artifi cial Color: Bright and Complementary, J. C. Loudon (1783–1843) 45
Specimen: The Necessity of Observation (“Not All Greens Are the Same”)
Artifi ce: Color of Distinction
Color Charts: Mixed-versus-Solid Debate
Ornament: Color for Every Season
Class Distinction: Color as Social Code
Hendon Rectory, Middlesex, UK, 1838
Hoole House, Cheshire, UK, 1838
3 Color as Impression: Graduated Harmony,
William Robinson (1838–1935) and Gertrude Jekyll (1843–1932) 69
Primacy of Color over Form
Foliage Aesthetics: The Return of Green
Intergrouping: Spectrally Adjacent Harmony
Living Pictures, Flowering Calendar
Special Coloring: One-Color Garden
Gravetye Manor, West Sussex, UK, 1885–1935
Munstead Wood, Surrey, UK, 1883–1932
Part II Modernism 99
From Material to Sensation
Primary Colors Versus White
Early Modernist Color Forays in European Gardens
4 Material and Phenomenal Color: Simultaneous Contrast,
Gabriel Guevrekian (1900–70) 109
Simultaneous Contrast, Color in Motion
Phenomenology: The Psychology of Color
Modernized Tradition: Polychromatic Mosaic
Permanence: Minerals and Special Light Eff ects
Photography: Gardens in Black and White
Villa Noailles, Hyères, France, 1926
Villa Heim, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, 1927–8
5 Spatial Color: A-Chrome, Garrett Eckbo (1910–2000) 137
Space: Structural Color Revised
Climatic Regionalism, Rational Color
Synthetic Material: Stain and Sparkle
Consumer Culture, Colorful Lifestyle
Axonometry Customized, Photography in Color
Alcoa Forecast Garden, Los Angeles, CA, USA, 1956–9
Union Bank Square, Los Angeles, CA, USA, 1964–8
Symphony of Color: Tropical Saturation, Roberto Burle Marx (1909–4) 167 6
Illumination and Regional Identity
Composition: Symphony of Color
Hybridity: Artifi cial Ecologies
Tropical Modernism: Cultural Mosaic
Medium: Art and Landscape
Ministry of Ed ucation and Health, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1938–43
Edmundo Cavanel as Residence, Petrópolis, Brazil, 1954
Part III Postmodernism, Onward 195
From Pigment to Aff ect
The New Sublime, Minimal and Land Art
Radiant Architecture, Luminous Landscapes
Conceptual Color: Purely Synthetic, Martha Schwartz (b. 1950) 205 7
Transfi guration, Pop Color, and Day-Glo
Critique: Green and Other Landscape Jokes
Humor, Wonder, and Bliss
Color Wars, Branding, and Image Making
Pantone, RBG, and SuperPaint
Davis Garden, El Paso, TX, USA, 1996
Mesa Arts Center, Mesa, AZ, USA, 2005
Aff ective Light Color: Translucence, Petra Blaisse (b. 1955) 241 8
Curating Textiles and Landscapes
Lines and Imprints: Color Itineraries
Luminosity: Color-Sphere
Tactile Color and Contemporaneity
Multimedium: Bricolage, e-Collage, and Montage
Seattle Central Public Library, WA, USA, 2000–5
Biblioteca degli Alberi (Library of Trees), Milan, Italy, 2003–4; 2008–18
9
Color Now: Gender, Skin, and Screen 275
Naughty Color: Monochrome, Claude Cormier (b. 1960),
Claude Cormier + Associés, Montreal, Canada 276
Gender, Identity Politics
Visual Games, Camoufl age, Pun, and Flavor
Photographic Mediation, Cartoon, Collage, and Superrealism
Instagrammable Color: Radiance, Martin Rein-Cano (b. 1967),
TOPOTEK 1, Berlin, Germany 288
“Chemotherapy,” Visibility, and Ambiguity
Color Stories, Identity, and Marking
Real/Surreal, Alice in Wonderland
Rhythms of Color and Light: Black, White, and Blues, Walter Hood (b. 1958),
Hood Design Studio, Oakland, California 304
Painting versus Drawing, Field versus Figure
In-Visibility: People of Color
Color Stereotypes, Material to Last
Postscript: Color Prospects 320
Index 324
Mira Engler, “My Blue Garden,” composite drawing, environmental autobiography, student project, 1977
Preface
My scholarly interest in color first surfaced in a conversation with my doctoral
advisor, Sylvia Lavin, a professor and architectural theorist at the University of
California, Los Angeles. Her focus on color as an instrument of affect, one that announces
a contemporary sensibility, or what she calls “presentness,” informed my dissertation on
the postwar work of the British architectural illustrator Gordon Cullen. Color was one
of Cullen’s representational devices to signal urban modernity. This small but meaningful
exploration of color triggered a floodgate of ideas and made me conscious of the absence
of color discourse in landscape architecture theory, even as color gained prominence in
contemporary landscape and urban design practice, enhanced by digital representation
programs and computer interfaces.
More deeply, I can trace my interest in color back to my neighborhood public park
where I grew up in Holon, Israel. It was named “The Blue Garden” but we kids called it
simply “the garden.” Everything about it was designed with the color blue in mind. The
amoeba-shaped fishpond at the center mirrored the blue skies, and all the surrounding
trees and shrubs blossomed in blue and purple. I spent most of my out-of-school time
playing there with neighborhood kids. We took over the lawns, benches, trees, bushes,
and flowers for our games. I remember the clouds of purplish-bluish flower bundles and
castanet-like fruits of the Jacaranda mimosifolia trees planted around the park’s edges;
the fragrant pink, purple, and white orchid-like flower of the Bauhinia purpurea; the
purple flower clumps and minty smell of the leaves of Buddleja ‘Lochinch,’ the Rosmarinus
officinalis, and the Salvia leucantha; the musky scent of the Vitex agnus-castus; the purplish
flowers of the low-lying Lantana montevidensis; and the light blue flowers of the pervasive
Plumbago capensis shrub. We carried the sticky flowers of the plumbago on our clothes and
hair when we came out of our hiding places in the bushes during hide-and-seek.
It was only later, when I enrolled in landscape architecture at the Technion in Haifa
that I learned about Zvi Miller, of Miller-Blume Landscape Architects, who designed the
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