Christopher Tunnard

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Christopher Tunnard (1910, Victoria, British Columbia — 1979) was an Canadian-born landscape architect, garden designer and author of Gardens in the Modern Landscape (1938). He was the cousin of the British surrealist artist John Tunnard (1900-1971).

[edit] Biography

Born and educated in Canada, where his Lincolnshire-born father had moved as a young man, in 1929 Tunnard went to England and obtained a Diploma from the Royal Horticultural Society in 1930.

From 1932-1935 he worked as a garden designer for Percy Cane, an exponent of the Arts and Crafts movement. He then embarked on a European tour, becoming interested in avant-garde art and architecture.

His noted landscape projects include his landscape architecture for Serge Chermayeff's house Bentley Wood at Halland, Sussex,[1]; and for his modification of existing 18th century gardens at the circular Art Deco St Ann's Hill House in Chertsey designed by Raymond McGrath, where Tunnard lived for a short time with his then partner, the stockbroker GL Schlesinger.[2]

He wrote a series of articles for the Architectural Review, later re-published as a manifesto, Gardens in the Modern Landscape. In 1939, he designed the garden for the "All-Europe House" at the Ideal Home Exhibition, Earls Court.[3] In the same year he emigrated to America, at the invitation of Walter Gropius, to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

He was drafted into the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1943 and after the war took a job teaching city planning at Yale. Enjoying the work, he did little further garden design, and reached the post of professor and chairman of the department of city planning. His publications in this area include articles such as America's super-cities[4] and a number of books on city design in the USA, his best-known probably being Man-made America - Chaos or Control? (1963) cowritten with Boris Pushkarev.[5] This won a National Book Award in 1964.[6]

In 1969 Yale disciplined him by demotion for sending out unauthorized admission letters to prospective students, following an unresolved departmental dispute.[5]

[edit] Design philosophy

Tunnard came to England in a period when garden design was strongly influenced by the work of Edwin Lutyens, Gertrude Jekyll and Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott. The eclectic Arts and Crafts movement was drawing on this background to focus on garden features such as crazy paving, pergolas, sundials, sunken pools and statuary.[7]

Tunnard viewed this as "romantic trivialisation" of garden design and in reaction spearheaded a Modernist approach to landscape design, which he expressed in the polemical Gardens in the Modern Landscape. His approach avoided decoration, sentimentality and classical allusion in favour of functional minimalist designs. For instance, his acclaimed landscape for Chermayeff's Bentley Wood house, itself Modernist, simply thinned the surrounding woodland and replanted areas with drifts of daffodils. His writings influenced a further generation of designers such as Thomas Dolliver Church.[8]

[edit] References

Christopher Tunnard, Gardenvisit.com

  1. ^ Modernism, History of Environmental Design course notes, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape
  2. ^ Going Full Circle, Fay Sweet, Evening Standard, London, August 8, 2001
  3. ^ An All-Europe House: A Pocket Ideal Home, The Times, Apr 28, 1939
  4. ^ America's super-cities, Christopher Tunnard, Harper's Magazine, August 1958
  5. ^ a b Yale disciplines three of its staff, The Times, May 28, 1969
  6. ^ National Book Awards Are Presented to Six Authors; Prizes of $1,000 Given for the Best Works Published in '63, Harry Gilroy, The New York Times, March 11, 1964
  7. ^ A century in a nutshell, Tim Richardson, Daily Telegraph, London, November 5, 2005
  8. ^ Keep it sleek: Architects and garden design rarely make good bedfellows - with the exception of a new breed of Modernists, Tim Richardson, Daily Telegraph, London, April 23, 2005
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