In 1995 my colleagues Jane Gillette, Sarah Vance, Gina Crandall, and Jim Trulove founded Spacemaker Press to produce books and later a magazine (Land Forum) to be sold in architectural design and art bookstores, of which there were about 20 in the United States and perhaps another 20 in Europe and Asia.  

It has now been 30 years since Spacemaker Press published its first book on landscape design.  Our purpose at that time was to add books about landscape art and design to the many books about architecture in bookstores and libraries.  That goal has been largely achieved, and publications of landscape by other presses are now readily available worldwide.

Over these ensuing years, however, we have entered the digital age where books and even magazines have largely been replaced by on-line communication.  A new generation of landscape students and practitioners has arrived worldwide, and the imperative of global warming has greatly expanded within the profession, both in practice and schools.  The sale of books dealing with landscape art and design has declined as the field has turned to the web for the majority of its visual information.  Historic projects and new additions are less accessible through bookstores and libraries.  In addition, many of the books published over the last 25 years are out of print, as well as out of fashion.

The idea of an online gallery began with a conversation I had with my colleague David Meyer last February.  David had just taken down a large show dealing with 20 years of artful grading, largely on a project in Omaha named Heartwood.  He had begun his explorations into earthworks when he was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 2001 and pursued it over the years.  It has resulted in a monumental project.  The sizable show consisted of drawings and models describing many of the unique elements taken to their completion.  It was a complex show and had taken months of preparation.  However, the exhibition was limited by the museum to seven days.  David estimated that perhaps more than 300 people had seen the show over the week that it was up.

I had a similar show of recent sculptures based on my professional design work of more than 40 years with a series of 27 sculptural wall pieces.  The show lasted four weeks including several openings.  Perhaps 350 people saw the show.

Both of these exhibits required months of preparation, and we were both looking at the bleak possibility that our public showing had come to an end.  We then organized a small group of like-minded practitioners and jointly came up with a question:  What if there were some other way to respond to what we all felt was perhaps a market for the results of the design process? We found that many of our designer friends had similar questions.  Beyond our original group, we identified larger groups of teachers, practitioners, students, and allied professionals, including a new generation of landscape architects who had not had our years of professional experience.   

As we talked, the idea of “SPACEMAKER GALLERY” emerged.  It would feature new and historical projects and adjacent activities in visual and descriptive forms often created by its originators or historians.  From time to time we could have online discussions of the various shows.  The shows would be available on-line where they could be uploaded by the many current students and then forever indexed (archived) by their year of exhibition.  Condensed formats of previous Spacemaker publications, as well as other books and lectures, might also be accessed.  All of these online shows would be available to students, practitioners, and others free of charge.  The shows (exhibits) would show the complexity and variety of beauty in landscape art and design.  

If we can begin to show the many roads to BEAUTY and convey it to a wider public—students, designers, and people with related interests—we feel that we are beginning to approach a high purpose that needs to be fulfilled.  

1996 l 2016 THE NEW LANDSCAPE DECLARATION

Marc Treib, Professor of Architecture Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, is a historian and critic of landscape architecture and architecture who has published on a wide variety of modern and historical subjects in the United States, Japan, and Scandinavia. His writings have helped shaped the study of modern landscape architecture and architectural regionalism along the Pacific Coast.  

Author of  hundreds of articles, hundreds of invited lectures, he has published over thirty books on architecture, landscape architecture, and art—most recently: The Landscapes of Modern Architecture: Wright, Mies, Neutra, Aalto, Barragán; The Aesthetics of Contemporary Planting Design; Serious Fun: The Landscapes of Claude Cormier; The Shape of the Land: Topography and Landscape Architecture; Poodling: On the Just  Shaping of Shrubbery; and Noguchi's Gardens: Landscape as Sculpture. 

He is currently at work on three books: Alexandre Chemetoff, Landscapes and Urbanism: Changing Everything without Changing Everything; Building Light: Aalto, Ando, Flavin, Turrell; and A History of Modern Landscape Architecture.