If you’ve ever wondered what it might feel like to picnic, play, or wander through a painting by Jean Arp, Joan Miró, or Wassily Kandinsky, you might try visiting a private or public garden designed by Robert Royston.
Instead of seeking inspiration from formal French or Italianate gardens or English estates—the norm when Royston was a student in the late 1930s—he transformed modern art’s geometric lines, overlapping planes, and biomorphic curves into some of the most intimate, functional, and comfortable outdoor spaces imaginable.
“I was always consumed with the way space moved, be it a painting, a sculpture, or the outdoors,” recalls Royston, still vibrant and dapper at 89, with the warm demeanor and sparkling blue eyes of a family doctor as depicted by Norman Rockwell. As a student in landscape architecture, he took his site plans to the art department for criticism. As a teacher, he designed a special transparent “model box” to help his students manipulate images in order to consider the psychological impact of a space: How would it feel if it were narrower, sunnier, more enclosed or exposed?
“Bob is one of the most important pioneer modernists in landscape architecture,” says Reuben Rainey, coauthor with JC Miller of Modern Public Gardens: Robert Royston and the Suburban Park. “His work is derived from avant-garde painting and sculpture, but the form-giving was always based on the needs of the individual users. So many parks are just a scattering of equipment; his designs are truly spatial and reflect a deep understanding of human interaction.”
Royston got his modernist feet wet in 1938 while a student at the University of California at Berkeley, apprenticing in the office of Thomas Church. A few years later, as a boat commander in the navy and witness to carnage he couldn’t talk about for years, the nights kept him sane. “I would creep into my office and dream about landscape architecture, sketch houses, make jewelry,” recalls Royston, who is also a lifelong painter.
Back in the Bay Area after the war, Royston resumed his friendship with Garrett Eckbo—who had shaken things up, designwise, with Dan Kiley and James Rose at Harvard—and the two, along with Edward Williams, set up the firm Eckbo, Royston, and Williams. (After an amicable split in the late ’50s, Royston founded the firm that became Royston, Hanamoto, Alley & Abey.) Royston and Eckbo shared not only an aesthetic approach, but a belief that design could have a positive impact on people’s lives. Royston once wrote: “We work in the realm of health: our profession can restore a marsh, purify the air, abate noise, and provide systems in the city where trees will grow and people can gather, exercise, and laugh.”
“Bob’s goal was to get people outdoors,” says JC Miller. “Lots of his early work was on steep sloping lots, and decks gave people usable space. Today, sliding-glass doors and decks are taken for granted, but when he was starting out, this was revolutionary.” Royston’s artistic sculpting of the space—with overlapping planes of paving, decks, and benches often sheltered beneath one of his circular suspended umbrellas—created graphic compositions that were inviting and functional, and just as compelling when viewed from above.
One of Royston’s living laboratories is his home in Mill Valley, California, designed 60 years ago by former office mate and Bay Area modernist architect Joseph Allen Stein. Recalls Royston: “I looked over his shoulder at a house he was designing for himself, and I liked it. So I bought half his property and did a reverse plan in exchange for doing his garden. It was a good deal!”
The concrete-slab dwelling, filled with art and paneled in wood with a rolled-copper-covered fireplace, has a triangular central living area that opens to the outside through walls of glass. The gardens seem to lap around and up to the house. “The gardens are extensions of the house,” says Royston, who still takes pleasure in pointing out how the polished-concrete flooring aligns with the pavers across the threshold. The main terrace flows into a bench-lined deck that extends, pierlike, toward Mount Tamalpais, and is furnished with tables tiled by Royston’s friend, the renowned ceramicist Edith Heath. The rose garden, planted in rolling pots of Royston’s design and tended by his wife, Hannelore, sits behind a screen embedded with panels by artist Florence Swift that Royston created for SFMOMA.
Many of Royston’s techniques in private gardens—the intimate spaces, undulating walls, vine-smothered pergolas, screens, and places to eat and play—carried over into his suburban parks, albeit on a larger scale. Never merely ornamental, the Mondrianesque paving patterns and furnishings helped shape the space and define zones until the foliage matured. And unlike the urban pastorals of Frederick Law Olmsted, for example, where plantings create a green buffer between park and street, Royston designed his parks to be peered into, seducing passersby with a host of recreational and restorative possibilities.
Royston still recalls his excitement when the call came to design one of his first large spaces, the grounds for the Standard Oil Rod and Gun Club in Point Richmond, California. “Garrett was primarily based in Los Angeles, and Ed [Williams] wasn’t interested. Back in 1950, a park was considered among the dullest things you could do—a few trees and a baseball diamond. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it.” Built by employees on their off hours, the private park bears signature Royston touches—sculpted fences that create wind blocks and sun traps, berms that subtly sculpt the land, and an inventive, modernist playground whose custom structures offered an exciting alternative to the galvanized schoolyard offerings.
At Mitchell Park in Palo Alto (which recently underwent a historic rehabilitation and celebrated its 50th birthday), Royston synthesized his aesthetics with his civic philosophy: “A community park should have something for all ages,” he explains. “It is not an outdoor gymnasium, but an intimate space where everyone should feel at home—families, friends, children, and old people.” Scattered throughout are picnic areas originally enclosed by hedges and wooden screens. They are sheltered, but not severed, from groves of trees, an amphitheater, a giant checkerboard for seniors, and the famous tot lot, whose biomorphic shape keeps caregivers within viewing and shouting distance of the children.
By the time Royston retired from full-time practice, his firm’s projects included nine national and state parks, ten regional and county parks, 109 city and community parks, countless residential gardens, and communities such as Sunriver, Oregon. But the prolific output was not without its disappointments. In the optimistic post-war years, when much of the Bay Area was still open space, Royston had envisioned a “landscape matrix”—a system of interconnected green spaces, akin to Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace—to help organize and humanize suburban neighborhoods. “But land planners have never seen the landscape as a primary form determinant. Rather, it’s ‘Here’s a thousand acres—let’s do a new town!’ Then any little leftover pieces, you get to make a park. Well, it’s tragic, a missed opportunity,” says Royston, sighing.
However, rewards still come when least expected. “I met a young couple out at Mitchell playground last year, and the woman told me, ‘When we were first married, we stayed way over on the other side of the park and played tennis. Now with children, we’re over here every weekend.’ The park is working for them. That was very satisfying to hear.”
2 / Royston and his great friend Garrett Eckbo were both members of Telesis, a visionary group of Bay Area architects, designers, and planners concerned with environmental and social issues.
3 / Like Eckbo, Royston had a strong social conscience. He was forced to resign his teaching post at UC Berkeley in 1951, after refusing to sign the loyalty oath during the McCarthy witch hunts.
4 / The 20-foot-high spiral slide Royston designed for the Standard Oil Rod and Gun Club was for years the Bay Area’s tallest piece of play equipment—a source of delight both to him and its end users.
5 / A college thespian (“Gregory Peck was in one of my classes; I guess our careers took different turns!”), Royston still regales dinner guests with spot-on impersonations of Julia Child’s antic gestures and fluting tones.
6 / Among Royston’s favorite unbuilt projects is a Utopian-sounding community in Lake Tahoe, for which he proposed four strategically placed parking structures, on-call buses—and no cars.
7 / At a presentation to developers in Sunriver, Oregon, Royston recalls, he told them, “‘If you divide this property into one-half-acre waterfront lots, you will make millions of dollars! However, we propose building no houses on the water.’ They went for it! Today there are more than 30 continuous miles of nature trails.”
8 / The renovation of Mitchell Park’s tot lot in the ’90s inspired a protest demonstration by schoolchildren, one of whom stated, “We want a modernist playground!”
9 / Royston swims daily, was a ballroom dancer, and stages fierce pétanque (French bocce ball) matches in his lower garden.
10 / Royston received the ASLA Medal in 1989, the highest honor bestowed by the American Society of Landscape Architects.
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