nature-by-design

“This year’s Arts club exhibition opened yesterday afternoon with the galleries hung in most delightful fashion with pencil sketches and etchings, plans and landscape designs…executed by students of the Lake Forest Foundation for Architecture and Landscape Architecture. … They are most capitally done and of sufficient beauty to attract the eye of those who do not recognize the grounds and buildings which they bear witness to.” ~Chicago Tribune, October 18, 1930

Nearly eight decades have passed since these drawings last graced the walls of the Chicago Arts Club, but their delight and beauty remains.

Embedded within each sketch are the hopes and ambitions of its creator, the elbow grease and broadened horizons of student architects and landscape architects. Shining behind each canvas are the goals and ideals of the instructors and judges and sponsors, those who sought to establish in the Foundation “a working for the future of America and its expanding beauty.”

These drawings have traveled: from the drafting rooms of College Hall to downtown galleries to display cases at Midwestern universities. Some have puttered along in a 1930 Chevy up and down the East Coast; others have sailed across oceans and flown over the cities and countryside of Europe.

All, however, ended their journeys in the same place: relegated to storage in the then‐new Lake Forest Library. By the mid‐1930s, the drawings bore witness as the way of life they represented came crashing down. New realities closed the door on the Country Place Era they depicted, the finances providing their pencil and watercolor and raison d’être dried up, and their student creators were forced to forge untrodden career paths and fashion a new, modern era of design.

Some of the drawings resurfaced from the basement 50 years later, when fittingly they were restored through the support of the Lake Forest Garden Club, one of their initial underwriters. Others were discovered during the Lake Forest Children’s Library renovation 10 years ago. In Nature By Design, we are pleased to bring them to light once more: to admire their skill of composition, to become reacquainted with grounds and buildings both bygone and nearby, and to examine a noteworthy endeavor in architectural education.

What is the Foundation for Architecture and Landscape Architecture?

“This rather clumsy name expresses more clearly than any shorter one could the aims and intentions of an educational scheme whose…experimental years have proved its worth.” ~Katherine Lancaster Brewster, American Architect, 1928 The Foundation for Architecture and Landscape Architecture was an innovative summer program of advanced training for graduates of architecture and landscape architecture at Midwestern universities. Six sessions were held between 1926 and 1931 on the campus of Lake Forest College. Throughout the summer, the 16 students learned techniques from masters of their fields, utilized the houses and grounds of neighboring estates as examples for analysis, and worked together on drawings and assignments. The closing of each session featured a competition in which judges selected one pair of students as the winners of a year‐long traveling fellowship in Europe.

Its impetus? To nurture collaboration between architects and landscape architects, who were educated separately but often had to partner on such commissions as the country places of Lake Forest and Lake Bluff. “The whole idea of the foundation,” ran a 1928 newspaper account, “is to increase artistic perception and ability working with nature in tangible form. That the building and the ground from which it rises should be one perfect whole is the goal.”

Its medium? An incorporated foundation, directed by such leaders in landscape education theory as Ferruccio Vitale and Stanley White, promoted by such expert garden club members as Margaret Blake and Kate Brewster, and backed by such devoted patrons of the arts as Edward L. Ryerson and Alfred E. Hamill.

Memberships and donations to the Foundation funded the room, board, and travel expenses of its students.

For a rather clumsy name, Foundation for Architecture and Landscape Architecture proved apt, indeed.

Bringing Together the Sister Arts

“We all feel—we all know—that all the arts are sisters. The fundamental principles of [architecture and landscape architecture] are the same, and mutual understanding among artists is the greatest factor in education of man.” ~Ferruccio Vitale, The Western Architect, 1926

Although architecture and landscape architecture were firmly established in the mind of Ferruccio Vitale as sister arts, from a professional standpoint landscape architecture lagged at least a generation behind. The American Institute of Architects was founded in 1857, the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1899.

The first formal university curriculum in architecture was organized at MIT in 1865, the first formal curriculum in landscape architecture at Harvard in 1900. In the Midwest, land‐grant institutions like the University of Illinois and Iowa State College led the way in teaching landscape gardening courses.

However, even at Illinois, no formal landscape architecture degree was offered until 1907. By the 1920s, though, education in landscape architecture had taken off, with at least 41 programs offered by institutions across the nation.

Why? The unparalleled era of economic prosperity beginning in 1890 had created an increased demand for architects and landscape architects. Nowhere was this burst in construction better epitomized than in Lake Forest, with its flurry of commissions for estate homes and gardens. And these Lake Forest clients mirrored their national counterparts in their desire for harmonious country places, where architect and landscape architect collaborated to merge building and landscape into one perfect whole.

However, architects and landscape architects were not necessarily accustomed to working together. This separation began at the university, where architects were typically trained in colleges of engineering, with emphasis on structure and less attention to site and landscape, while landscape architecture programs were often housed in colleges of agriculture with emphasis on horticulture and less attention to larger issues of design. By the mid‐1920s, the trend to view both architecture and landscape architecture as fine arts began to prevail, with resultant restructuring in some collegiate departments.

With the construction of great estates like Villa Turicum in the early It was into this educational climate that the Foundation for 1900s, professional opportunities for landscape architects multiplied.

(Image courtesy of the Lake Forest Library.)

Architecture and Landscape Architecture would launch in 1926.

The Institute of Landscape Design

In the summer of 1925, the Lake Forest Garden Club organized a series of lectures and discussions on the subject of landscape architecture. The Institute of Landscape Design, as it was called, took place at Gorton School in Lake Forest and included visits to several local gardens. Nearly 200 participants heard talks by well‐known Eastern landscape architects Warren Manning and Ferruccio Vitale that emphasized landscape design as a fine art.

This was a logical outgrowth of the activities of the Garden Club, which sought to bridge the gap between laymen and professionals, and to showcase gardens as products of composition and design, rather than mere groupings of “horticultural assets.” The Institute was the brainchild of club president Margaret Day (Mrs. Tiffany) Blake, who was convinced that landscape design needed more in‐depth study.

In the Institute’s wake, Ferruccio Vitale and the Garden Club organizers discussed how to best harness the momentum: “Informal conversation indicated a desire to direct the enthusiasm for gardening into channels of larger usefulness, by extending in the Middle West, education in and for landscape architecture.” The ideas of Vitale and Margaret Blake, with the input of other interested Lake Foresters and landscape educators, eventually resolved themselves in a plan that was to have its tryout the following summer – a plan that was realized in the Foundation for Architecture and Landscape Architecture.

Margaret Day Blake, Chicago Tribune, October 13, 1930

Chicago Tribune, July 8, 1925

A Setting of Perfect Appointment

“They called for the country’s most brilliant young artists in a setting of perfect appointment for securing the best artistic development.” ~1931 Annual Report

The choice of Lake Forest as the home of the Foundation was a logical one, given that a number of residents were already interested in the project, the College offered convenient housing, and the varied resources of Chicago were close at hand.

Most importantly, though, according to Ferruccio Vitale, “no other one place in the Middle West offers opportunities so fine and so extensive for such study.”

As a setting that featured the work of such celebrated practitioners as Howard Van Doren Shaw, David Adler, Charles Platt, Rose Standish Nichols, Warren Manning, and Frederick Law Olmsted, Lake Forest was indeed the Midwestern capital of Country Place design.

Beyond furnishing models for study, though, Lake Forest offered other, subtler benefits to the students of the Foundation. Kate Brewster took note of some of these in American Architect:

“[The students] have had no chance to acquire the general cultural background without which success in the two professions they have chosen is impossible. In Lake Forest and along the North Shore to Chicago, houses and estates are thrown open to them. They learn what those who have built houses and made gardens expect and demand and how they live in them after they are built. They meet people whose chief interest is artistic development. Their whole point of view is enlarged, new standards are set, new visions inspired.”

Lake Foresters like Katherine Lancaster Brewster, shown gardening, graciously opened their homes to Foundation students. (Chicago Tribune, June 8, 1930)

The Foundation for Architecture and Landscape Architecture uniquely allowed its participants to study the scenes of their future work not as employees, but as students and guests.

A Very Interesting Term

“That was a very interesting term, it was just a couple of months in the summertime and we had our living and our meals and the advantage of going to see all these wonderful estates.” ~L. Morgan Yost, 1931 student

The scholarships provided by the Foundation took care of the students’ board, lodging, and travel expenses. Space was rented from Lake Forest College in College Hall (now Young Hall), where male students roomed, where participants gathered for meals in the Coffee Shop, and where foundation lectures, studio and drafting work, and exhibitions took place. (In 1926 and 1927, female students were housed both in a private home on Deerpath and in Lois Durand Hall; in 1931, the men moved their quarters to the Kappa Sigma fraternity rooms at Harlan Hall.)

The Foundation Board of Trustees, local architects and institutions, and Lake Forest businesses all came together to provide supplies and attend to the needs of the students. The Griffis Brothers furnished drawing boards and horses at cost to the Foundation; landscape architect F. A. Cushing Smith invited students to his office to utilize the facilities for the preparation of problems; the School of Architecture at the Chicago Art Institute, the Chicago Architectural Club Atelier, and the Armour Institute all lent drafting room equipment; Alfred Hamill graciously allowed students the use of his fine library; landscape architect James L. Greenleaf donated his entire professional collection to the Foundation upon his 1929 retirement. In 1928 the Foundation purchased a Chervolet for both local trips and the longer tours of the Condé Nast fellows. By 1931, the Chevy had tallied 50,780 miles over three summers, and Laura Shedd (Mrs. Charles) Schweppe made a gift of a new six‐cylinder touring model.

Recreation for the students extended beyond their own campus, as they were entertained by Lake Forest hosts and hostesses several times during the summer, most notably in a session‐ending banquet. Led by Kate Brewster, Laura Schweppe, and Margaret Blake, these festive occasions allowed students to see how architectural designs and landscape layouts functioned in the whirlwind of domestic life. Such affairs played in the memory of even Chicago suburbanite L. Morgan Yost, who recalled, “Oh yes, we were entertained… some of the students from small towns of Iowa had just never seen anything like that.”

Opening Doors of Beauty and Information

“The students are drawn chiefly from the middle west and they are in every case picked men. They come with honors from their own universities. The summer course at Lake Forest simply opens more doors of beauty and information to them.” ~Chicago Tribune, October 18, 1930

Most Foundation participants were honor students selected by the faculties at Ohio State University, Iowa State College, the University of Illinois, and the University of Michigan. These were the principal Midwestern institutions to offer degrees in both architecture and landscape architecture. In various years, graduates from the Armour Institute of Technology in Chicago, the University of Cincinnati, and Harvard University also attended. Participation was limited to between 16 and 18 students per session, and sometimes fewer if there were not enough qualified candidates.

Women numbered among the attendees for the first two summers only. After the 1927 session, female students were dropped due to the cumbersome nature of the special arrangements necessary for their participation, such as distinct living quarters and separate field study trips. Further, by the standards of the day no pair of mixed gender could be allowed to travel together unaccompanied, rendering it unlikely that a female student would ever be picked to win the Ryerson fellowships.

By 1928, a sculptor and a painter (usually from the Yale School of Fine Arts, and often the winner of the Prix de Rome) joined the architects and landscape architects to further the mission of collaboration among the arts. As Stanley White noted, the other students “fully appreciated the fine opportunity of the new association and made the best use of it, visiting the studios frequently and assimilating the essentials in the technical procedure carried out under their eyes.”

So Many Matters of Immediate Necessity

“Those subscribing to this enterprise are now being asked to support so many matters of immediate necessity that it is unwise to burden them now with the expense of a regular Summer session in 1932, which, no matter how desirable, is not an essential at this time.” ~Minutes of March 2, 1932 meeting of the Board of Trustees

In the autumn of 1929, the Foundation appeared well positioned for continued progress and success. With funding supplied for European and American fellowships, a rising corps of alumni, solid backing from the Lake Forest community, and the expansion of its student body to Harvard and Yale, the future looked bright. This growing national reputation inspired Lake Forest College President Herbert Moore to explore building the Foundation its own structure and appending it formally to the College.

Even after the 1929 Crash, for a few years the Foundation managed to maintain financial stability. By 1932, however, the Depression had lingered long enough to raises doubts about the vitality of support even from affluent Lake Foresters. At the March meeting of the Board of Trustees, the reports were grim: the lowest budget forecast for the summer session, $8,800 (a 40 percent cut from 1931) still exceeded the Foundation’s cash on hand by nearly $2,000.

With little recourse, the Trustees postponed the summer session but continued to award the Ryerson fellowship via long‐distance submissions from the usual universities. This limbo‐ like state of affairs persisted for three more years before the Board took definitive action. The fellowship money reverted back to the Ryerson family, who chose to maintain the European travel scholarship for landscape architects under the auspices of the University of Illinois.

Also contributing to the Foundation’s downfall were the protracted illness and death in 1933 of Ferruccio Vitale, and the 1935 hunting accident of later Foundation stalwart David Adler, pictured here preparing for the Onwentsia steeplechase in 1929. (Image from the Chicago Tribune, September 15, 1929.)

Even disregarding its own financial struggles, by the mid‐1930s the place the Foundation had carved for itself was beginning to disappear in other ways. As student L. Morgan Yost reflected years later, “We didn’t realize that was the time of the absolute demise of the fine country estate. There just weren’t any more.” By 1939, the tide of architectural and landscape design had shifted, from Country Place to public space. Taking note of these developments, The Ohio State Engineer supplied a fitting epitaph for the Foundation:

“There has been a subtle change in late years. Landscape architecture, which previously mirrored the pomp and wealth of the ruling classes and was essentially a garden art for the pleasure of the few, has taken on a strong sociological consciousness and is directed to city planning, park planning, and the beautification of housing development. It is now concerned with giving pleasure to the masses.”