Robert Royston

Robert N. Royston (1918 – September 19, 2008) was one of America's most distinguished landscape architects, based in the San Francisco Bay Area of California in the United States.

[1] His design work and university teaching in the years following World War II helped define and establish the California modernism style in the post-war period.

During his sixty years of professional practice Royston completed an array of award-winning projects that ranged from residential gardens to regional land use plans.

A recent book, Modern Public Gardens: Robert Royston and the Suburban Park, details this area of his professional creativity and philosophy.

Royston's mentor, H. Leland Vaughan, allowed him to experiment on his own with the new design perspectives emerging in the innovative work of Thomas Church and the more avant-garde explorations of Daniel Kiley, Garrett Eckbo, and James Rose.

Royston's interest in painting, which he continued to pursue in order to explore aesthetic principles applicable to his design work, can be traced to the studio art classes that were a part of his early education.

In his spare time aboard ship, Royston experimented with design ideas, building models of residential gardens and creating jewelry out of scrap materials.

In 1945 Royston returned to the Bay Area and accepted Garrett Eckbo's invitation to form a partnership with him and landscape architect Edward Williams.

Royston's early professional work was concentrated in Northern California and at first consisted mostly of residential site planning and garden design.

Royston's specific design vocabulary of layered, non-axial spaces and bold asymmetrical arcs and polygons suggests such influences as analytical cubism, biomorphism, and the rectilinear geometry of Mondrian's paintings.

For example, in a typical Royston park design, a wading pool for young children may be laid out as a visually engaging biomorphic form but at the same time is scaled to the distance a parent's voice can reach.

He envisioned parks as "public gardens" serving a wide range of users, including families, very young children, and the elderly.