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21/6/04
Jellicoe to Jencks: New landscapes, new allegories.
Two highly significant but very different landscape
and garden theorists are Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe (1900-1996) and Charles
Jencks (b. 1939). Geoffrey Jellicoe died in 1995, after 75 years
of creativity world-renowned and admired as one of the key architects
in the formation of the landscape profession. He left a remarkable
and still evolving body of theory in landscape and garden design,
practice-based and developed through application of a rigorously
practical yet deeply researched vein of thought, which was derived
initially from the study of classical philosophy and letters, then
tried and tested in the arena of Renaissance Art studies and subsequently
in the realm of contemporary painting and sculpture. Together with
his fellow student from the Architectural Association School of
Architecture, JC Shepherd, he paced out and surveyed numerous Italian
Renaissance Gardens, and they published the fruit of their research
in 1925 (publisher, Ernest Benn). Containing Shepherd's superb drawings,
and enhanced by a significant clutch of photographs by Alinari,
this work opened the eyes of many fellow professionals, just as
modern design was getting under way. Subsequently, through a growing
portfolio of project work, by close observation in the field, and
through lifelong research, Jellicoe transformed the way we view
the total environment. As Director of the Architectural Association,
he enlightened many pre-war students as a teacher there. With one
foot in classical learning, and one in the contemporary arts (his
friends were Henry Moore, Ceri Richards; his inspiration, like so
many others, the work of Paul Klee.) When Jellicoe died, he left
a massive gap in the landscape world.
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The second landscape and garden designer, of growing importance in
the 21st century is undoubtedly Charles Jencks. This is not to denigrate
in any way the brilliant clutch of his fellow American landscapists,
such as Kathryn Gustafson, Martha Schwartz, the venerable Lawrence
Halprin and his former student Angela Danadjieva, and, master of them
all, Peter Walker. They are all in professional league of their own,
as are the leading Europeans such as Hal Moggridge in England. But
it has to be recognised today that Charles Jencks has quietly, and
steadily built up his own body of work. Best known as an architectural
theorist and post-modernist thinker and critic, Jencks emerged from
the prescriptive morass of post-1945 architectural theory, and its
lack of any clear direction, to follow new ground rules opened up
by Robert Venturi, leading to a more eclectically diverse, and perhaps
liberated, design ethos. Quietly against this cacophony of raised
critical voices, disillusioned proto-modernists, Jencks was also,
in a very personal way, exploring for himself and his wife, Maggie
Keswick, house and surround in 'The House of Elements, Rustic Canyon'
in California (1984). To colleagues at the time this seemed to
represent for Jencks simply an insignificant, playful diversion. It
remains now a superb evocation of fundamental ideals for the allegorical
garden.
At the close of the 20th century, however, Charles Jencks was found
to have moved further into landscape considerations and, more specifically,
garden design. The richness of theory and its eclecticism in his
sourcing, which seemed in the 1980s to be showing symptoms of over-exposure
in the architectural arena, began to find a more appropriate field
of endeavour in the realm of garden design, seeming to partly fill
the gaping void left by the departure of Jellicoe in 1996. Jencks'
longstanding marriage to Maggie Keswick (among her talents, a specialist
in Chinese gardens) was brought to an end by her tragic death from
cancer in 1995. Maggie Keswick and Jencks had exchanged ideas with
Jellicoe for some time prior. Maggie's death did not occur before
the major groundwork at the Portrack House gardens had been laid,
in the early 1990s. Indeed well prior to that, as they fought her
cancer together, Jencks' re-entry into the landscape cosmos had
been precipitated by just this tragedy.
Now his powerful move into landscape-based design began to emerge
from the private chrysalis at Portrack. The project had enabled
a laboratory portfolio of ideas and inspiration to be developed
without interruption, but with the growing approval of a significant
coterie of friends, including architects Leon Krier, James Stirling,
engineer Cecil Balmond and the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi as well
as other thinkers and writers such as Paul Davies (who was awarded
the Templeton Prize in 1996 for his unique study, The Mind of
God).
What had begun as a mutual celebration by Jencks and Keswick of
a private world of landscape gardening, in an ancient European tradition
much pursued by landowners in both 18th century England and Scotland
became, in a short space of time, charged with an infusion of allegory,
postmodern reflection and speculation, and theoretical exploration.
The sculpted mounds, water features, and 'cosmic' ground profiles
began to materialise under Jencks' direction, through several seasons
and years.
These experiments (for such they were) began to breakout of the
Portrack compound. In 2001 Jencks first went public in the grounds
of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh with a landscape
entitled 'Landform Ueda' (now in great demand by children of all
ages as the ultimate playground). Daniel Libeskind's project for
the Imperial War Museum North (now built) at Salford by the Manchester
Ship Canal was to be enhanced by a wholly compatible Jencks scheme,
sadly axed for budgetary savings on the main building. And there
are on the drawing board today a host of new 'mitigation' projects
(with the successors in Scotland to the National Coal Board) whose
ramifications look extremely interesting, although these remain
under discussion.
Jencks’ book, published last year, on the Portrack project
The Garden of Cosmic Speculation (Frances Lincoln Ltd) contains
a very full description and elucidation of its development and the
emergent philosophy over the years since 1988. The book is a rich
mixture, but as with Geoffrey Jellicoe in his time, it is the sheer
enthusiasm, drive, and intellectual speculation of the man that
allows such ideas, now made manifest, to find a growing appreciation
in the broader landscape and gardening community. The allegorical
garden landscape was considered obsolete after Jellicoe. Charles
Jencks has opened up new concepts for all.
Michael Spens
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