Garrett Eckbo
After attending Marin Junior College for a year, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley where he majored in landscape architecture.
While Eckbo was at Berkeley he was influenced by two of the programs faculty members, H. Leland Vaughan and Thomas Church, who inspired him to move beyond the formalized beaux-arts style that was popular at the time.
in landscape architecture in 1935 and subsequently worked at Armstrong Nurseries in Ontario near Los Angeles where he designed about a hundred gardens in less than a year.
After working at the Nurseries, he was restless to expand his creative horizons and entered Harvard University's Graduate School of Design by way of a scholarship competition, which he won.
Beginning his studies at Harvard, Eckbo found that the curriculum followed the Beaux-Arts method and was similar to the one at Berkeley but more rigidly entrenched.
Eckbo, along with fellow students Dan Kiley and James Rose resisted and began to "explore science, architecture, and art as sources for a modern landscape design.
Gropius and Marcel Breuer introduced Eckbo to the idea of the social role in architecture, the link between society and spatial design.
After receiving his MLA degree from Harvard in 1938, Eckbo returned to California where he worked in the San Francisco Office of the Farm Security Administration.
Those major organizational plantings of Chinese elms, cottonwoods, mulberries, sycamores and other hardy species were softened with magnolias, oaks and olives for shade and almond and plum trees for color.
Mr. Eckbo had a leading hand in planning what many scholars consider the postwar period's finest subdivision scheme, the 256-acre Ladera Housing Cooperative near Palo Alto.
Mr. Eckbo's eagerness to experiment during the 1950s was epitomized by his theatrical Beverly Hills swimming pool design for the owner of Cole of California, the bathing suit company.
The landscape architect cantilevered a steel beam spanning the width of the pool to support a masonry wall and a series of concrete diving platforms that allowed models to swim under the backdrop unnoticed and then emerge like Esther Williams from the deep.
The very successful firm of Eckbo, Royston and Williams designed hundreds of projects including residential gardens, planned community developments, urban plazas, churches and college campuses.
He would eventually form the highly successful firm Eckbo, Dean, Austin and Williams in 1964, which in 1973, officially adopted the moniker, EDAW.
In a period in history when suburban sprawl was ascendant, EDAW's open space plan for the state of California was as innovative as it was provocative.
The firm drew up plans to preserve open spaces in danger of encroachment on the fringes of the greater Los Angeles-San Diego, Palm Springs, San Francisco Bay and Lake Tahoe areas.
EDAW also began to work internationally, with projects in New Delhi, India (Lodi Park and the Ford Foundation Headquarters) and Osaka, Japan (Civic Center) among other locations worldwide.
Mr. Eckbo's great success in doing just that is evident in the more than 1,000 highly varied schemes he produced for clients ranging from migrant farm workers in California's Central Valley to Gary Cooper in Beverly Hills.
But despite his important role in creating a distinctive new style of American landscape design during the expansive postwar years, when his lively, innovative gardens were the horticultural equivalents of the architecture and furniture of Charles and Ray Eames, Mr. Eckbo is still not as widely known outside certain practical and academic architectural and landscape circles, although his students and colleagues bear testament to his teachings and humanity.
He was survived by his wife, Arline, of Oakland; daughters Marilyn Kweskin and Alison Peper of Los Angeles; six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Though he gave up designing when he turned 80, he continued to write for several years after, including People in a Landscape, a summation of humanistic principles that at the time in the decade of the late 1990s may have seemed novel to a generation that grew up in a very different climate for design in the public realm than the social and economic transformations Eckbo lived through during the Great Depression and post war period.
