Going to the Source: Landscape Architecture
Those of us who went to Vassar learned this lesson subliminally, because from the beginning, the truths that govern the relationship between the natural and the human-made were always present for us, every time we walked on the campus. I take my evidence from my Vassar class and the Vassar community in Miami, where I live. I see an intrinsic understanding of the complex relationship of the natural and the human-made.
A few years back, I was asked to write a book on gardens for midcentury houses. I’d just wrapped up a five-year stint as editor of Modern Magazine and was fascinated by the way the midcentury-modern residential landscape broke tradition to connect the indoors and the outdoors. It was a threshold to the way we can (or should) live today. Long in the making, this book with the slightly unsexy title of Gardens for Modern Houses: Design Inspiration for Home Landscapes (Rizzoli, 2025), includes what I hope is a thoughtful essay about the important role of the midcentury garden in transforming the way we live with what the Smithsonian called “pools, patios, and the invention of the American backyard.” The book also, of course, has many beautiful and important residential gardens with images from terrific photographers.
Two of the gardens featured in the book were commissioned by my 1969 classmates, and a third house, in Chicago, was one renovated by the architect Margaret McCurry ’64, a project that was pure and beautiful. Her work has always been fine-tuned and intended to fit in with its surroundings, and this is true here.
The gardens created by my classmates were the result of both vision and aesthetic prowess. The first is a house in Key West, a more typical midcentury house that Susan Henshaw Jones ’69 purchased in the early 2000s with her husband, Richard. Susan hired the renowned, brilliant Raymond Jungles of Miami to design the landscape. Ironically enough, a jury I was on for the American Society of Landscape Architects gave it a national honor award, and honest to goodness, at the time I didn’t know the client was Susan, who—as director of the National Building Museum and the Museum of the City of New York—made an enormous impact on our understanding of architecture and cities. (I actually only learned that the house was hers when I was editing a story on this house, and halfway through, I had the epiphany.)
The second landscape—by the also brilliant, renowned landscape architect Doug Reed, who is based in Massachusetts—was commissioned by the late Barbara Saslaw Dixon ’69 and her husband, Chris. Barbara’s commitment to preserving the landscape was unwavering and admirable. I’d learned of her passion for this, also inadvertently, when we coincided more than 20 years ago at an event in Sonoma sponsored by the Cultural Landscape Foundation at the landmark modernist Donnell Pool and Gardens. Again, it was an unwitting but not unsurprising connection. Barbara and Chris had acquired an endangered swath of the Stonington, CT, countryside and then built a beautiful house designed by Maryann Thompson, who was later selected as the architect for The Dede Bartlett Center for Admission and Career Education at Vassar. Six degrees.
As I think about that Vassar landscape and the hours we spent wandering in it, I realize that the natural beauty of the campus was an implicit and all-important part of the experience. I’ve been growing ever more passionate about its subconscious effect on my life.
At Vassar, we were always taught to “go to the source.” in this case, I’d argue that the source is the land, the landscape, and the architecture, and the future is the way we appreciate, nurture, and preserve them.
