Landscapes transitional, modern, modernistic, modernist

Abstract

The term ‘modern landscape architecture’ normally qualifies those twentieth-century designs that looked ahead, rather than to the past. To be more precise, however, we might add to the broad category of ‘modern’ the sub-categories of ‘transitional’, ‘modernistic’ and ‘modernist’. Seen in this light, modern refers to twentieth-century landscapes that derived from the materials, technology and social needs of the times, but with no restriction on vocabulary. Modernistic landscapes borrowed in a similar way, but more superficially, retaining the spatial structure of historic landscapes_as did transitional works, including those rooted in naturalism. Modernist, then, specifically applies only to those landscapes that deliberately proposed and tested new spatial and formal ideas, often adapting graphic idioms drawn from the modern plastic arts.