Garrett Eckbo: Modern Landscapes for Living

By now, we all know that pools and certain other watershape forms have been around since ancient times.  It's my strong suspicion, however, that most of us who design and build backyard swimming pools today would fail a pop quiz about those who pioneered the 20th-century genre of pool design.   I was among you in not knowing, for instance, about the seminal role played in this arena by a man named Garrett Eckbo - this despite the fact that he's one of the icons of landscape architecture.   As a founding member of (and the "E" in) EDAW, Eckbo was responsible for some of the grandest public spaces in the United States.  He was also, it seems, an innovator in residential garden and pool design who put his stamp on just about every basic pool form we use today. I picked up this knowledge from a book by Marc Treib and Dorothy Imbert called Garrett Eckbo: Modern Landscapes for Living (University of California Press, 1997).  The 190-page volume covers the major career phases of a California-based designer and longtime professor who

By now, we all know that pools and certain other watershape forms have been around since ancient times.  It's my strong suspicion, however, that most of us who design and build backyard swimming pools today would fail a pop quiz about those who pioneered the 20th-century genre of pool design.   I was among you in not knowing, for instance, about the seminal role played in this arena by a man named Garrett Eckbo - this despite the fact that he's one of the icons of landscape architecture.   As a founding member of (and the "E" in) EDAW, Eckbo was responsible for some of the grandest public spaces in the United States.  He was also, it seems, an innovator in residential garden and pool design who put his stamp on just about every basic pool form we use today. I picked up this knowledge from a book by Marc Treib and Dorothy Imbert called Garrett Eckbo: Modern Landscapes for Living (University of California Press, 1997).  The 190-page volume covers the major career phases of a California-based designer and longtime professor who