Contemporary gardens as art and frame
The gardens and landscape of the Getty Center are easily the largest and most easily accessible example of contemporary landscape design in the Los Angeles area, if not the western United States.The Getty Center complex spreads like an Italian hill town on the slope of the Santa Monica Mountains and is interwoven with a vast array of garden and landscape environments, all set within a vast sea of native chaparral and oak trees. Within the complex itself are two typologies of landscape: the architectural landscape designed by the Olin Partnership and the legendary Emmet L. Wemple, and the commissioned work of art that is the flowing sculptural Central Garden by artist Robert Irwin with Spurlock Poirier.
Continue to the next page for a brief photo tour and further description of the landscapes.
Landscape Firm: Olin Partnership
Landscape Firm: Emmet Wemple and Associates
Central Garden description: Robert Irwin
Landscape Firm: Spurlock Poirier
Architecture Firm: Richard Meier & Partners
Book: Robert Irwin Getty Garden
Book: Seeing the Getty Center Buildings & Gardens
Garden descriptions: Landscaping at the Getty Center
Jennifer Siegal's Office of Mobile Design (OMD) has designed two prefabricated lines of modular dwellings, and has begun production of the "Portable House."
"One of the central figures in modern landscape architecture, Garrett Eckbo (b. 1910) has been a major influence in the field during an active career spanning five decades. While most of the early American designers concentrated on the private garden and the corporate landscape, Eckbo's work demonstrated innovative design ideas in a social setting. This engagement with social improvement has stayed with Eckbo throughout his life, distinguishing both his intentions and achievements, from his early work for the Farm Security Administration to his partnerships (including one of the most prominent landscape firms in the world, Eckbo, Dean, Austin, and WilliamsEDAW) and his years as chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. In an elegant and detailed book that includes more than 100 of Eckbo's designs, Marc Treib examines the aesthetic formation of Eckbo's manner, and by implication the broader field of landscape architecture since the 1930s. Dorothe Imbert writes about Eckbo's social vision, including his belief that ultimately, landscape design is the "arrangement of environments for people." The book also contains a biographical and professional chronology and a complete bibliography of publications by and about Garrett Eckbo."
David Trubridge is one of New Zealand's best-known designers of contemporary furniture. He has designed some very nice indoor/outdoor pieces, and we like his general philosophy.
You can not only adjust the height of this clever little light fixture by Swiss designers Caroline Felix and Valentin Brun, but also the length as well.
The Farnsworth House, built by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1951 and located near Plano, Illinois, is one of the most famous examples of modernist domestic architecture and was considered unprecedented in its day.
The Groovetube is simply a translucent plastic box that suction cups to the screen of your television. It has a grid of dividers inside it that diffuse the colors from your T.V. producing an amazing colorful abstraction of anything you watch.