Ian McHarg and the Search for Ideal Order

Kathleen John-Alder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781134811328
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Ian McHarg and the Search for Ideal Order looks at the well-known and studied landscape architect, Ian McHarg, in a new light. The author explores McHarg's formative years, and investigates how his ideas developed in both their complexity and scale. As a precursor to McHarg's approach in his influential book Design with Nature, this book offers new interpretations into his search for environmental order and outlines how his struggle to understand humanity's relationship to the environment in an era of rapid social and technological change reflects an ongoing challenge that landscape design has yet to fully resolve. This book will be of great interest to academics and researchers in landscape architectural history.

Part 1

Early affinities

1 Experience and education

Whether the wish is father to the thought, or whether sentiment and idea have a common genesis, there equally arises the question – Whence comes the sentiment?

Herbert Spencer, First Principles¹

Glasgow

Ian Lennox McHarg was born in 1920 and spent his childhood in Radnor Park, a suburban town fourteen miles from the center of Glasgow, Scotland in a house that overlooked the shipyards of the River Clyde. Behind his home, past the Great Western Highway, the hills of the Scottish Highlands loomed.² He was the eldest of four children in a family that aspired to bourgeoisie gentility. His father, John Lennox McHarg, contemplated a career in the Presbyterian ministry but due to the Great Depression instead weathered a number of unanticipated economic setbacks. To support his family, he worked variously as a manager for the Diesel and Edison Lamp Company, a part-time reporter for the Associated Scottish Newspapers, and a traveling salesman for a business machine and equipment company. McHarg would credit his own exuberant (and by some accounts manic) energy and interest in religion to him. His mother, Edith Bain McHarg, was a talented dress-designer and seamstress. McHarg would credit his artistic ability and love of the outdoors and gardening to her.³

In the 1920s and 1930s, the decades of McHarg’s youth, the economy of the industrial port city of Glasgow centered on steel manufacturing, shipbuilding, and transatlantic trade. In Design with Nature, a photograph of a bleak courtyard surrounded by tenement housing represented the character of the city. A corresponding photograph of picturesque stone buildings surrounded by mountains represented the character of the countryside. As mentioned previously, he adventurously explored both terrains (Figure 1.1).

By his own admission, McHarg was a talented student. He scored in the top percentiles of the high school qualifying exam, entered the “A stream” curriculum, studied two foreign languages (one old and one new), and began to prepare for university and a career in the ministry, law, medicine, or civil service. He spent Saturday mornings drawing and painting at the Glasgow Art Gallery and won many awards for his efforts. He visited the library on the way to the gallery. His path in life seemed obvious, and yet he was restless and felt confined by the conventions of middle-class life. He longed for adventure.

Figure 1.1 Photographs of Glasgow and the Highlands from Design with Nature. © 1992 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Reprinted by permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

At age sixteen, he resolved to quit school, become a cadet officer for the Cunard Line, traverse the globe, and experience the excitement of faraway places. His father discovered his intent and soon put a stop to his plan.

Following this aborted attempt at independence, the young rebel acquiesced to his father’s demand that he complete his education. A careers counsellor noted his artistic talent and love of the outdoors and suggested a five-year apprenticeship in landscape architecture that he could complete under the auspices of Donald A. Wintersgill, a Beaux Arts trained architect who specialized in the design of country estates and rock gardens. When they first met, Wintersgill impressed his protégé with a climate-sensitive reading of the landscape that included a grand scheme for a forest, lake, and small village nestled in the bracken-covered mountains of the Scottish Highlands. Wintersgill’s dramatic style of dress – an Inverness cape, deerstalker hat, bow tie, and spats – and dramatic style of presentation – a 180-degree sweep of his walking stick as he described his ideas – provided additional enticement. McHarg soon learned to draft design plans, produce watercolor renderings, calculate cost estimates, coordinate the dispatch of plants from nurseries, and supervise construction. This experienced culminated in the landscape design of the Empire Exhibition held in Glasgow, Scotland in 1938.⁴ To appease his father, he attended night courses at the West of Scotland Agricultural College and the Glasgow College of Art. Perhaps best of all, Wintersgill taught his apprentice how to drive a car.

World War II and the military

In May of 1938, in a flurry of pre-war patriotism, no doubt abetted by his insatiable energy and desire for adventure, McHarg resigned his apprenticeship, quit night school, and enlisted in the British Army. Over the next seven years, he was deployed to North Africa, Italy, France, and Greece. In each field of battle, he served with distinction. The successful completion of Officer Training School led to a promotion to second lieutenant and assignment to the Second Parachute Division of the Royal Engineers. He achieved the rank of major and the command of a brigade.

One of his notable military achievements involved the production of a document titled the Report on the Damage Caused to the Working of the Apulian Aqueduct by the German Army and on the Work Done to Repair the Aqueduct. McHarg edited and signed the report, which contained an impressive array of photographs and drawings that recorded the destruction of war, and the subsequent repair of the siphons, pumps, and pipes by Pietro Celentani-Ungaro, the Director of the Aqueduct Corporation⁵ (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 A drawing from the Apulian Aqueduct study. Ian L. McHarg Papers, The Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania.

McHarg also enrolled in a correspondence course in town and country planning established for military personal by the London School for Reconstruction and Development in conjunction with the Association for Planning and Regional Reconstruction (APRR).⁶ The course singled out “men in the Forces who either intend to become Town Planners, or who wish to be able to take responsible and informed part in the physical reconstruction of the country after the war.”⁷ The curriculum, formulated by the planner Jacquelyn Tyrwhitt, consisted of three modules – Background of Planning, Planning Factors, and Planning Practice. An acolyte of the Scottish planner Patrick Geddes and a member the Modern Architectural Research (MARS) Group – the English affiliate of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) – Tyrwhitt introduced the students to bioregionalism and architectural modernity. Following the methods developed by Geddes and MARS, course exercises required students to first collect and map a broad array of social and economic data and then correlate this information to physical geography (physiography) and human settlement patterns. In the process, they learned how to produce a balanced synthesis of multidisciplinary information. The pedagogical prototypes for this activity included the regional survey maps prepared by the APRR for the National Plan.⁸ This set of black and white maps of England, Scotland, and Wales documented a wide range of information: Fog and Sunshine, Water Catchment Areas, Arable Land, Hills and Valleys (topography), Woodland, Extractive Industries, Farm Workers, Employment, Unemployment, Hazardous Employment, Trade and Transport, Local Government Boundaries, the Electric Grid, Women in Industry, Overcrowding, Tuberculosis, Doctors, and Secondary Schools. The booklet of maps came with two acetate overlays – one in blue that located chief urban areas and the other in red that depicted population distribution. When placed over the black and white maps, the overlays established a visual correlation between the statistics depicted in the maps and the loci of urbanization. McHarg completed all three modules of the correspondence course and obtained the credentials needed to enroll in the post-war completion course. To become a professional planner, he only needed to sit for the Intermediate Examination of the Town Planning Institute, the last step in this professional certification route.⁹

The correspondence course clearly presaged the central focus of McHarg’s later career, but he still retained a strong interest in design. In 1945, he entered and won a competition for a World War II memorial and cemetery in Athens, Greece for British soldiers killed during the Battle of Greece. The hillside cemetery was built and it is located several kilometers southeast of the city overlooking the harbor. A memorial arch anchors the design and frames views of a stone of remembrance and a white cross. Stone plinths, engraved with the history of the Greek campaign and the names of the dead, flank the arch. Gravestones flank the plinths (Figure 1.3). Although more modest in scale and execution (but not necessarily in its derivative ambition), the repertoire of elements calls to mind the iconic Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens in 1932.¹⁰

Figure 1.3 World War II memorial and cemetery in Athens, Greece. Ian L. McHarg Papers, The Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania.

Shortly before his military discharge, McHarg applied for, and received, an Army Release Scheme Scholarship that provided tuition and a stipend to attend the higher education institution of his choice. He used the monies to pay for study at the Graduate School of Design (GSD) of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. No post-degree employment stipulations were attached to the funding; however, all parties to the agreement, including McHarg, tacitly assumed he would return to Scotland following graduation and contribute his expertise to post-World War II reconstruction.

When he submitted his application to the GSD, McHarg feared that he would not be admitted because he lacked the requisite high school diploma. Intent on pursuing a university degree in landscape architecture, which was exceedingly difficult to accomplish in Britain at that time due to the scarcity of institutions offering instruction, he went on the offensive.¹¹ He sent a telegram to Bremer Pond, the chair of the landscape architecture department, announcing his decision to study at Harvard and the date of his arrival. Left out of his confession – an omission that highlights his willingness to dramatize the truth in deference to a good story – was the fact that his apprenticeship, noteworthy achievements as a military engineer, successful completion of Tyrwhitt’s highly regarded correspondence course (and her close ties with the faculty of the GSD), winning entry for the Athens cemetery competition, and full scholarship administered by the Department of Health in Scotland, indicated he was a well-qualified candidate and all but ensured his acceptance. Moreover, half of Harvard’s 1946 admissions consisted of veterans, as the institution, in the words of Provost Paul Buck, sought to blend “democratic selection into aristocratic achievement.”¹²

Harvard

In September 1946, one month shy of his military discharge, McHarg began his studies at the GSD with the proviso that he would enter the graduate program upon satisfactory completion of the first year of under...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Early affinities
• Part 2 The place of nature
• Part 3 Implementing order
• Part 4 The Patterns of paradise
• Bibliography
• Index