Required Reading: ‘The Modern Garden’ Delves Into Mid-Century Landscape Architecture

As a practicing architect, a professor of architecture, and the author of ten design books, Pierluigi Serraino knows modern architecture intimately. But for his latest, The Modern Garden: The Outdoor Architecture of Mid-Century America, Serraino is stepping outside. Serraino says he was motivated to curate and write this book after visiting iconic modern houses in person and seeing these structures within their landscapes.“There’s a gap of understanding between architects and landscape architects,” he says. “I have detected this time and again in my work, my research work on architectural photography and my actual work as an architect: There is a fundamental imbalance between architecture and landscape.” The Modern Garden attempts to bridge that gap.

The book features photographs from many of architectural photography’s mid-century greats, including Julius Shulman, Morley Baer, and Ernest Brown, but Serraino has combed through their archives to find photos that may be unfamiliar even to connoisseurs. “I looked specifically at shots where the camera was pointed away from the building,” says Serraino. “I uncovered the enormous richness of landscape design.” 

The text unfolds as four essays that explore landscape architecture, and in some ways, this is a book aimed at professionals in the spheres of architecture and landscape architecture–Serraino calls it “an invitation for these designers to understand the reciprocity between architecture and site.” The book is also a celebration of landscape design work that often received less attention than the architecture. (Indeed many of the landscapes featured in The Modern Garden are unattributed because the designer’s names went unrecorded or have been lost.)

Perhaps most important, The Modern Garden is an excellent reference for the home gardener or professional designer creating a garden around a modern house. Flipping through these vintage landscapes, it’s hard not to notice how dynamic and playful the gardens are and in turn, to desire to recreate their spirit today. “This book resets our memory to understand how much we have lost along the way,” says Serrraino.

Here are six lessons we took away from The Modern Garden:

Photography from The Modern Garden.

1. Landscape design is not an afterthought.

Serraino says the big lesson from the book for architects, landscape designers, students, and even municipalities should be that landscape should be conceived in concert with the architecture. “Today, most of the time, you see architecture that is an object on a piece of land,” says Serraino. He argues for homeowners to make a plan for their landscape design at the same time that they hire a designer to remodel or build a home, cautioning that the landscape budget is always cannibalized by the building.

2. The site should inform the garden.

Landscape architects are almost always inspired by nature, but Serraino says, “You have to be specific about what kind of nature. The landscape of Cyprus is marvelous, but it’s completely different from the one of London, which is different from that of Finland, which is different from Arizona and Mexico.” Serraino says the best landscape architecture is “more specific, a little more tailored” to its site.

3. We should blur the lines between landscape and architecture.

The photos in The Modern Garden reveal how seamlessly architecture and landscape flowed into one another in the modern era. “We hear a lot about indoor-outdoor architecture, but there’s outdoor-indoor architecture, too, where the garden comes into the house,” he says. “I believe strongly in the merging of these two mindsets.”

4. In modern gardens, hardscaping takes the dominant role.

Photo after photo in the book reveals the way that midcentury landscape architects played with hardscaping materials to create graphic lines and define spaces in unique ways. “The hardscape is really profoundly consequential,” says Serraino of the modern landscapes in his book. “Landscape architects can do powerful things through planting, but it has to be organized in space,” he says. 

5. Landscapes should be designed for living.

Flipping through The Modern Garden, the gardens often have a lived-in quality that is palpable: There are signs that children play and adults entertain in these spaces–and Serraino says that is intentional. “We need the outdoors, we need terraces,” says Serraino. “We need some kind of an outlet that is not just a generic piece of concrete, but rather  a thoughtful sequence of architectural events that you can inhabit.”

6. Modern gardens are worth preserving.

If you have a midcentury home that still has signs of the original design, consider researching it and building upon it, rather than starting over. “I am by no means someone that wants to rewind time,” says Serraino, but he believes the past is worth preserving, especially as these gardens are literally disappearing. “Often the landscape is erased,” says Serraino. “That’s the challenge of our gardens. They are extraordinarily vulnerable.” This book keeps their memory alive.

See also:

• 10 Ideas to Steal from Midcentury Modern Gardens
• Landscaping Ideas: Mid-century Minimalism in Christchurch, New Zealand
• Sleekness in Seattle: Modern Garden, Midcentury House