LESSONS FROM DRY LANDS

I n a mid-1900 address to the Oak Park Fellowship Club in Chicago, Frank Lloyd Wright discussed many of the central preoccupations of his work; these are outlined in a polemic he wrote, entitled “Concerning Landscape Architecture.”1 Ostensibly a lecture to a local community group, it is filled with opinion about approaches to landscape design. Then just a few decades old, the design discipline of landscape architecture grappled with the legacy of the “styles,” the doctrines of the beaux arts and other imported traditions. Most came from Europe and modernism had yet to be seen on bookshelves or in magazines. Debts to history were stock-in-trade.

Wright’s words reveal much about the sources of his early thinking and attitudes to landscape design, citing Gertrude Jekyll and her then fresh-published book ,2 a work Wright suggested should