Landscape Legends, a full-day symposium at East Hampton’s LongHouse Reserve focused on the intersection of modernist architecture, landscape design, and cultural history, will take place starting at 9:30 Saturday morning.
Titled “Modernist Landscapes: Visionaries and Their Gardens,” its subjects include Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Russell Page, Louis Kahn, Lawrence Halprin, Harriet Pattison, Robert Venturi, and Denise Scott Brown.
This year’s participating scholars are Barry Bergdoll, the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History at Columbia University; Caleb Smith, professor of English and American Studies at Yale University; William Whitaker, curator and collections manager of the Architecture Archives of the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design, and Deborah Nevins, a noted landscape designer and chairwoman of LongHouse’s garden committee.
Mr. Bergdoll will discuss the landscape visions of the iconic Modernist architects Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier.
Mr. Whitaker will talk about Harriet Pattison, the influential landscape designer who, among other projects, collaborated with Louis Kahn on the landscape at the memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt on Roosevelt Island and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth.
Mr. Smith will offer a perspective on the work of the garden designer Russell Page, whose sensibility blended classical traditions with modernist innovation, and who recorded his observations and practice in his book “The Education of a Gardener” (1962). The talk will be followed by a conversation with Ms. Nevins.
The day will begin with a 9:30 reception, to be followed at 10 by Mr. Bergdoll’s “Abstraction and Nature: Gardens in the Work of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier.”
Garden walks and snacks are on tap between 10:45 and 11:30, after which Mr. Whitaker will talk on Pattison. “A Modern Mystic: Art and Nature in the Gardens of Russell Page” will run from 12:15 to 1:30, followed by lunch in the garden.
Tickets for the event are $250. Tickets for the morning program only, for students and young landscape and design professionals, are $50.
