1950s Hardscape Styles

Features

• Typically, the grid plan design of the flat-roofed 1950s home extended out into the garden. Looking out through glass walls, rectangular forms within the home were echoed in geometric hardscaping beyond. There was an increased focus on "outdoor living" with patios, wood decks and swimming pools. Designers of higher-end developments provided more individualized homes that were better-blended with their landscape than typical post-war subdivisions. At Hollin Hills in Fairfax County, Virginia, driveways followed natural contour lines and each yard blended into the next without fences. Houses and gardens on split-levels hugged the hilly site, while providing visual interest.

Daniel Urban Kiley

• Between 1953 and 1955, Daniel Urban Kiley designed landscaping for more than 90 homes in Hollin Hills. The clean, geometric forms of his hardscaping are today largely overgrown by plantings or buried under additions. Kiley's hardscape designs are better preserved in his public spaces: Capitol Park, Washington, D.C., or the grounds of the Art Institute of Chicago. These demonstrate grid design, the extensive use of concrete and stone, fountains, pools and long "allees" -- staight paths lined by trees. Kiley collaborated with Eero Saarenen -- architect of Dulles International Airport -- on projects including the Irwin-Miller Garden in Columbus, Indiana. Like many 1950s designs, the Irwin-Miller garden was subdivided into "outdoor rooms" furnished with sculpture and concrete benches.

Thomas Church

• Thomas Church likewise collaborated with Saarenen. At the General Motors Technical Center in Michigan, Saarenen's glass walls look out onto Church's concrete allees and large, rectangular lake. In smaller-scale projects, Church has been designated the father of the California garden style. California was ideally suited to the modernist emphasis on outdoor living. Smaller lots meant the swimming pool dominated the garden, dictating the shape of surrounding hardscape features. Pools were shaded by pergolas that jutted out from the house. Church saw the pool as both striking visual focal point and functional family social center. While rectangular pools worked well with modernist geometry, Church also experimented with other forms. The Donnell Garden, Sonoma, California, features his influential kidney-shaped pool, with a central sculpture.

Garrett Eckbo

• Garrett Eckbo felt the shape of the plot and the needs of the client should dictate the shape of the pool. Consequently, Eckbo's hardscaping is individualistic. His pools combine lines and curves. They may be long and snaking, amoeba shaped, or at Ocotillo Lodge in Palm Springs, California, keyhole-shaped. Eckbo's design for the Brody mansion in Los Angeles exemplifies how 1950s architecture and hardscaping combined to bring the outdoors in, and the indoors out. With the same forms and textures used indoors and out, the two elements work together in a style of functional simplicity.