Fletcher Steele and his Vision of Landscape Design at the Dawn of Modernism

Abstract

Fletcher Steele (1885-1971), American landscape architect, played a critical role in development of modernism in landscape design in the United States throughout 1920s and 30s. Hisextensive and detailed study of the French gardens by the modernist designers such as Tony Garnier, Gabriel Gevrekian, Andre Vera, Pierre Legrain, and others have delivered several conceptual thoughts on the treatment of garden space. It is his claim that artifacts in gardens to generate visual illusion, composition of geometrical forms in three dimensional space, spatial relationship with modernist architecture, all these concepts lead to developing space composition which represents a critical factor of modernist space in landscape.