Alfred Caldwell: the life and work of a Prairie school landscape architect

Abstract

Alfred Caldwell is one of the 20th century's pre-eminent landscape designers. Called genius by Jens Jensen, he corresponded with Frank Lloyd Wright and visited him at Taliesin in Wisconsin. He collaborated regularly with German city planner Ludwig Hilberseimer and worked behind the scenes with Craig Ellwood in California on projects that brought Ellwood prominence. Caldwell taught architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology at Mies van der Rohe's invitation and at the University of Southern California, earning a reptutation at both institutions as the most demanding and inspiring professor on the faculty. Yet this radical thinker consistently attacked the academic peers and the parks and roads they designed, cried out against the loss of natural prairie lands to unchecked urban expansion, often began lectures with provocative discussions of the atom bomb, and even asserted that capitalism would likely collapse and be replaced by a more just communist economic system. In this text, the essays, poetry, drawings, autobiographical writings, and correspondence of Caldwell cover topics ranging from landscape design to the role of technology in the 20th century to the history of architecture. He attacked the ideas behind urban renewal and promoted instead an organic, decentralized city that carefully exploited the environmental advantages of placing polluting industries downwind, gave residents ready access to healthful sunlight, separated traffic from pedestrians with green space, made walking to work possible, and formed neighbourhoods into new settlement units.