As part of our 25th anniversary celebration, we publish formative magazine layers on our website. This story previously appeared in Dwell's September 2007 edition.
If you have ever asked yourself how it could feel Picnic, playing or walking through a painting by Jean Arp, Joan Miró or Wassily Kandinsky could try to visit a private or public garden designed by Robert Royston.
Instead of being inspired by formal French or Italian gardens or English goods – the norm when Royston was a student at the end of the 1930s – he converted the geometric lines of modern art, overlapping aircraft and biomorphic curves into some of the most intimate, functional and comfortable outdoor spaces.
“I was always moving with the path, be it a painting, a sculpture or nature,” recalls Royston, who is still alive and apper, with the warm appearance and sparkling blue eyes of a family doctor, as shown by Norman Rockwell. As a student in the landscape architecture, he brought his location plans to criticize the art department. As a teacher, he designed a special transparent “model box” to help his students manipulate images to take into account the psychological effects of a room: How would it feel if it were closer, sunnier, enclosed or more exposed?
“Bob is one of the most important pioneer moderists in the landscape architecture,” says Reuben Rainey, co -author at JC Miller of Modern public gardens: Robert Royston and the suburban park. “His work is derived from avant-garde painting and sculpture, but the form of the form was always based on the needs of the individual users. So many parks are just a spread of equipment; its designs are really spatial and reflect a deep understanding of human interaction.”
In 1938 Royston got his modernist feet wet as a student at the University of California in Berkeley and studied in the Thomas Church's office. A few years later, as a boat commander in the navy and witness of the slaughter, he could not speak for years, and the nights kept him healthy. “I would sneak into my office and make jewelry from landscape architecture, sketch houses,” recalls Royston, who is also a lifelong painter.
Back in the Bay Area after the war, Royston took up his friendship with Garrett Eckbo with Dan Kiley and James Rose in Harvard, together with Edward Williams, who set up the Eckbo, Royston and Williams company. (After a friendly separation at the end of the 1950s, Royston founded the company that became Royston, Hanamoto, Alley & Abey.) Royston and Eckbo not only shared an aesthetic approach, but also the conviction that design could have a positive effect on the life of people. Royston once wrote: “We work in the field of health: Our profession can restore a swamp, clean air, to leave the noise and to provide systems in the city, grow in trees and to collect, train and laugh.”
“Bob's goal was to bring people outdoors,” says JC Miller. “Many of his early work was on steep, sloping properties, and decks gave people usable space. Today glass doors and decks were taken for granted, but when he started, this was revolutionary.” Royston's artistic sculptation of the room – with overlapping plants, decks and benches, which are often protected under one of its circular, suspended umbrellas – created graphic compositions that were inviting and functional and so convincing when they are viewed from above.
One of Royston's living laboratories is his home in Mill Valley, California, which was designed 60 years ago by the former office buddy and the modern architect of Bay Area Joseph Allen. Remembered Royston: “I looked over his shoulder in a house that he had designed for himself, and I liked it. So I bought half of his property and made a reversal plan to do his garden. It was a good business!”
The concrete-slab apartment filled with art with art and with a rolled fireplace with a rolled Koper is located over a triangular central living area, which opens outwards through glass walls. The gardens seem to be rounded into the house. “The gardens are extensions of the house,” says Royston, who is still enjoying it to point out how the polished, with the floors with the paving stones about the threshold. The main terrace flows into a deck lined with a bank, which extends like pier-like in the direction of the Mount Tawalpais, and is equipped with tables from Royston's friend, the renowned ceramicist Edith Heath. The rose garden, which was planted in rolling pots of Royston's design and cultivated by his wife Hannelore, sits behind a screen that is embedded by artist Florence Swift, which Royston created for Sfmoma.
Many of the techniques of Royston in private gardens-die intimate rooms, wavy walls, pergolas with wine vine, which can be eaten and played in its suburban parks, albeit on a larger scale. The Mondrianesque pavement patterns and furnishings have never made only decorative, the space and define zones until the leaves matured. And in contrast to the urban pastors of Frederick Law Olmsted, for example, where plantings create a green buffer between the park and street, Royston designed his parks, into which he tenses and seduces passers-by with a variety of leisure and restoration options.
Royston still remembers his excitement when the call designed one of his first big rooms, the site for the standard oil rod and the Gun Club in Point Richmond, California. “Garrett had primarily in Los Angeles and Ed [Williams] Was not interested. As early as 1950, a park was viewed among the most boring things they could do – a few trees and a baseball diamond. I couldn't wait to get it into my hands. “The private park was built by employees in their leisure time and meets in the Signature Royston touch.
In Mitchell Park in Palo Alto (which recently subjected a historical rehabilitation and celebrated its 50th birthday) Royston synthetic his aesthetics with his bourgeois philosophy: “A community park should have something for all ages,” he explains. “It is not outdoor high school, but an intimate place where everyone should feel at home – families, friends, children and old people.” Picnic areas that are originally enclosed by hedges and wooden umbrellas are distributed everywhere. They are protected, but not separated, from tree goods, an amphitheater, a huge chess board for seniors and the famous dead -los, whose biomorphic form holds the nursing staff in the tour and screaming of the children.
When Royston retired from full-time practice, the projects of his company belonged to nine national and state parks, 10 regional and county parks, 109 city and municipal parks, countless living gardens as well as municipalities such as SunriVer, Oregon. But the productive performance was not without disappointments. In the optimistic post -war years, when a large part of the Bay Area was still open, Royston had a “landscape matrix” – a system of coexisted green rooms, which were comparable to Olmsted's Emerald Hall chain, to organize and humanize suburban quarters. “But country planners have never seen the landscape as a primary form. Rather, it is 'here are a thousand morning – let a new city do it!' Then you can make all the little ones left, it is tragic, a missed opportunity, ”says Royston.
However, the rewards still come when it is least expected. “I met a young couple on the Mitchell Playground last year, and the woman told me:” When we were married for the first time, we stayed on the other side of the park and played tennis. Now we are here every weekend. “The park works for you.
