Learning landscape architecture from the Bauhäusler. Garrett Eckbo and the FSA camps

One of the main outcomes of the Bauhaus-thinking in the garden design can be found outside Europe. It is the case of many American landscape architects who met the Bauhaus Masters during their exile in the United States. Although not intentionally aimed at their training, the teachings of Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer at Harvard in the 1930s and 1940s marked an entire generation of landscape architects, who then produced a radical renewal in the field and finally its entry into modernity. They are authors such as Lawrence Halprin, Daniel Kiley, James Rose, Robert Royston. Garrett Eckbo was one of them. As a student in landscape architecture, he quite secretly attended Gropius' architecture lessons at GSD, discovering what he himself will call the "link between social and spatial reasons of design". Eckbo joined four main topics from the Bauhaus transplanted to the United States: the civil commitment of any design action; the attitude to consider the landscape as an architectural space, to be modelled in its three geometric dimensions; the analogy with the other arts, in the broad sense; the idea that gardens can authentically express modern culture, in all its functional, symbolic, aesthetic, and technological features. During his long career, Eckbo explicitly cites the works of visual artists, such as Moholy-Nagy and Kandinsky, as references for his gardens. But if that were all, frankly there would be no reason to be more interested in Eckbo's work than that of any other exponent of the very fertile Modernism between the two sides of the Ocean in the final decades of the first half of the last century. What makes Eckbo quite unique and extraordinary is a very limited portion of his career, the one between 1939-1942, when he worked for the Farm Security Administration. During the Dirty Thirties, a tremendous and prolonged drought stroke Oklahoma, Arkansas, New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas, as told by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath. Faced with this epoch-making tragedy, the FSA hired a group of excellent designers to design a series of camps for the migrants. Eckbo was among them. His gardens for migrants are very reminiscent of Mies van de Rohe's layouts, an explicit reference for Eckbo's work, which he wrote about, with vegetation in place of screens and points. The keynote of the planting scheme is the use of plants as space-organizing elements rather than as decoration. In four years, Eckbo drew about 50 fields, always placing his ethical motivations within an expressive framework that constantly was the elaboration of a new modern language. He used trees and other minimal devices to build feeling-at-home conditions, safeguard the collective and private dimensions of living, allow each one to express one's own individuality through open spaces. Eckbo's designs embody the most authentic lesson of Bauhaus: to bond solutions for the minimum dignity of living with an authentically modern lexicon.