Although Rose never graduated from high school—he refused to take music and mechanical drafting—Cornell accepted him as an architecture student.
Among Rose’s four influential books is Modern American Gardens—Designed by James Rose, penned under the pseudonym Marc Snow (and reputedly submitted to his publisher as “a snow job”).
In 1960, Rose was invited to attend the World Design Conference in Japan. Frequent return trips sparked his interest in Zen Buddhism, and he meditated daily.
Rose hated meddling in his designs. “A client planted some impatiens in front of this sculpted evergreen modulation of light and space,” recalls Dean Cardasis, “and he got a disgusted look and said, ‘It’s like painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa!’”
Rose defines “elegance” in his book Gardens Make Me Laugh: “It’s a nightmare. Something like that Bavarian village that William Randolph Hearst brought back to California—but not quite alive because he forgot to bring the Bavarians and that’s something like Salome forgetting to bring the body when she presented John the Baptist to the king.”
Having been homeless during the Depression, Rose abhorred waste, and regularly repurposed discarded objects: An old door became a poolside bench, a barbecue was reborn as a fountain, and lanterns were made from roofing material.
Rose once got into a fistfight with James Thurber, and another time sicced his German shepherd, Mr. Hyde, on MoMA officials during discussions about a sculpture garden.
He once said he lost more clients than he got, and that suited him just fine.
Although inspired by Japanese culture, Rose was aghast at its wholesale transplanting to American soil. When a client asked for a Japanese garden, he famously replied, “Of course, madam, where in Japan do you live?”
Informed of Rose’s death, Dan Kiley reminisced to Cardasis: “Space, and spatial mystery, that’s what got us turned on, me and Jim, and Garrett. Modern is not a zigzag, or a this or a that. Modern is our present understanding of space.”
