Garrett Eckbo; Landscape Architect

Garrett Eckbo, the dean of West Coast landscape architects, died May 14 after suffering a stroke at a retirement home in Oakland. He was 89.

A retired professor of landscape architecture at UC Berkeley, Eckbo was a leader of the modern landscape movement, creating gardens the New York Times once called “the horticultural equivalents of the architecture and furniture of Charles and Ray Eames.”

Eckbo designed outdoor spaces for the very poor as well as the very rich. His projects ranged from the grounds for a Central Valley housing project for migrant farm workers to gardens for Hollywood luminaries such as Gary Cooper and Louis B. Mayer.

A native of Cooperstown, N.Y., Eckbo grew up in Alameda, Calif. He studied landscape architecture during the 1930s at UC Berkeley and later at Harvard, where he encountered the modern movement and studied under professors such as Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus.

The Bauhaus influence on Eckbo was profound, reflected in the asymmetrical geometry of his landscape designs.

His first major job was in the San Francisco office of the Farm Security Administration, where he and his colleagues in the New Deal agency created “baroque scale” patterns of tree plantings for farm workers’ encampments.

He later designed plans for 50 West Coast housing sites for defense workers during World War II.

After the war, he settled in Los Angeles, where he practiced for two decades ending in 1965. Eckbo believed it was here that he did his finest work.

One project during a period of experimentation in the 1950s was a highly theatrical pool designed for the owner of Cole of California, a swimsuit company. The Beverly Hills pool featured a series of diving platforms that allowed models to disappear unnoticed into its depths and surface like Esther Williams.

“L.A. is larger, looser, a place of freer movement socially than the Bay Area,” he once said. “The years I spent there were the best of my professional life.”

In 1965 he joined the landscape architecture faculty at UC Berkeley, serving as department chairman until 1969. He was a professor until 1978. He continued to take on landscaping work until a few years ago.

In the 1960s Eckbo designed the Fresno Mall, the first pedestrian mall in the middle of a California city. Around the same time he banished cars from the center of the University of New Mexico when he was hired to unify the sprawling campus by designing new outdoor spaces.

He founded several landscape architecture firms, most notably Eckbo, Dean, Austin & Williams in San Francisco and Los Angeles. He was the author of several books, including “Landscapes for Living” in 1950 and “The Art of Home Landscaping” in 1956.

He is survived by his wife, Arline, of Oakland, daughters Marilyn Kweskin and Alison Peper of Los Angeles, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Although he undertook massive public commissions, Eckbo believed that no space was too small for improvement. The landscape artist regarded the small garden as his laboratory.

A few years ago, he revisited a Los Angeles neighborhood for which he created a park-like setting in the 1940s. Two Los Angeles architects who owned a home in the Mar Vista development asked if he would tackle their tiny backyard. Accepting the assignment with pleasure, Eckbo placed a pond close to the house so that its sounds would carry inside and composed darker and lighter foliage to create an illusion of depth and “the opportunity for imaginative exploration.”

“You’re inventing a world that’s always changing, with enough order to avoid confusion but never so much that you get bored,” he said when the job was done. To Eckbo, that was the point of landscaping.