Resumen de Strident modernism/ambivalent reconsiderations: Christopher Tunnard's gardens in the modern landscape
There are few Modernist manifestoes in American or British landscape architecture. Moreover, little has been written to chronicle the rise of Modernism in the profession in the 1930s and 1940s. One of the earliest substantial theoretical contributions in the English language was Christopher Tunnard's Gardens in the Modern Landscape. Originally published as a series of articles in Architectural Review in 1937 and 1938, the first edition (1938) appeared comparatively late in the chronology of Modernism. The historic significance of this book lies in Tunnard's conception of landscape architecture during a period of dramatic change for Tunnard himself, and for the wider sphere of landscape architecture. The strident Modernist stance of the first edition was a product not only of the author's youthful and rebellious zeal, but also of the intellectual climate of British Modernism in the 1930s. To the second edition of the book, published in 1948, Tunnard added a new foreword in which he substantially reconsidered the emphatic tone of his original position. Between the first and the second editions, Tunnard had left Britain, taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, done military service during the war, returned to Harvard, and found his way to a professorship in city planning at Yale. These momentous events had changed his life. The chronicle of his personal re-examination of Modernism during the decade, revealed in a careful reading of the second edition of Gardens in the Modern Landscape, offers insight not only into Tunnard's changing directions but also into the changing nature of the disciplines of landscape architecture, city planning and architecture in the period from 1930 to 1950.
