Abstract

When the city undermines the health of its inhabitants and its landscape is the result of a mechanized and mercantilist production process that forgets the person as part of it, landscape architecture has to react. In the American sprawl cities, known as Suburbia, the landscape architect James C. Rose (1913-1991) opposed the egalitarian behaviour of modernity with his idea of a garden as an art form committed to the place. Deeply influenced by the Japanese spirit towards nature, his project in Ridgewood (1953) presents the idea of evolutional habitat as a house that grows and evolves with its user in a spatial perfection through the fusion of indoor-outdoor. In addition, his project in Baltimore (1956) presents how to conceive a form that comes from the place itself, as an instructive action for the client. The contribution of Rose to modern landscape architecture should be understood as that gardens inspire celestial paradises in the earth that are in themselves a failure due to their impossible materialization. Rose’s lawbreaker character remains in the lesson that each place has a different quality that only through the creative act it reveals.