James van Sweden

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James Anthony van Sweden (born February 5, 1935 in Grand Rapids , Michigan , † September 20, 2013 in Washington, DC ) was an American landscape architect .

Life

Van Sweden was born in 1935 to a building contractor of Dutch descent and grew up in a Calvinist family in Grand Rapids , Michigan , which has a large Dutch population. He learned to play the piano. As a child, he transformed the lawn in his parents' garden into flower beds. His neighbor, elementary school teacher Margaret Holmes, encouraged him to do artistic work and provided materials, as his parents did not approve or encourage such messy activities. As a teenager, Holmes took him on excursions in the vicinity of his hometown to paint and draw landscapes.

Van Sweden studied at the University of Michigan Architecture , which he with a BA graduated. Then he studied landscape architecture there . As a student he already collected pictures and drawings by Richard Wilt (1915–1981) and Emil Weddige , which he kept a secret from his parents. In 1960 he continued his studies in Delft and was influenced by the European abstract art of the time. He met members of the Orez group , including Jan Schoonhoven and CoBrA around Karel Appel, and bought pictures by Appel and Schoonhoven. He later expanded his collection to include works by Anne Truit and Grace Knowlton.

After returning to the States, he became a partner in Marcou, O'Leary and Associates , which he left in 1975. In 1977 he founded his own company with the German gardener Wolfgang Oehme , which is based in Washington, DC . Here he was primarily responsible for planning and finances. When he was forty he took ballet lessons at the Washington Ballet . He is also interested in Italian opera and Japanese kabuki theater. He also likes to use statues in his gardens, including those of Grace Knowlton . In 1987 he went to the Brazilian artist and garden designer Roberto Burle Marx , with whom he has been in correspondence ever since.

Van Sweden lived in Georgetown, Washington, where he had a very small garden and had owned a vacation home at Ferry Cove in Sherwood on Chesapeake Bay , Maryland , since 1998 . In 1996 he bought 10 hectares of arable land right by the sea, which he shares with two friends. The flat lake property, a soybean field, had been up for sale for eleven years because it did not seem to offer any scenic charm. Van Sweden supposedly reminded it of the homeland of its Dutch ancestors, where any sea view is blocked by dikes . He had the architect Suman Sorg , who otherwise works mainly for the American government and plans embassies, build a modern house that offered as much view of the landscape as possible. The ecologist Darrel Morrison advised him on transforming the overgrown fields into a natural garden.

Van Sweden was married to Linda Nordyke and the marriage ended in divorce. He died in Washington in October 2013 after a long period of Parkinson's disease .

Van Sweden was a member of the American Society of Landscape Architects . In the company Oehme / van Sweden worked, among others, partly as partners:

style

Van Sweden was mainly influenced by his German partner Wolfgang Oehme , who introduced the style of Karl Foerster in the United States and replaced monotonous lawns and evergreen plants around the house ("foundation planting") with perennials and grasses, which many customers initially considered Classify weeds. This is now known as the "New American Style". Noel Kingsbury calls their partnership the "turning point in the history of US garden design". Among the influences that shaped him, van Sweden cites Japanese Zen gardens and the work of Roberto Burle Marx and Piet Oudolf . The influence of Mien Ruys , with whose work he became known during his studies in the Netherlands, can also be felt. He took inspiration for the paving of gardens from the pictures of Dutch masters such as Jan Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch . Van Sweden saw gardens as tapestries ; he didn't want to break them up into individual parts like borders. Many of her gardens are designed like patchwork ceilings made of plant blocks, a style that van Sweden has since grown tired of. Like Oehme, he rejected lawns as boring, and he also considered them ecologically irresponsible because of the high water consumption, the high levels of fertilizer and pesticides and the noise from lawnmowers. For Noel Kingsbury, his career was based on iconoclasm . He considers him one of the great revolutionaries in the history of garden design.

plants

Van Sweden valued "coarse, expressive, aggressive plants" that are tough. His favorite plants include the grasses Schizachyrium scoparium , cultivars of Panicum virginiatum and American hackberry . In his late creative phase he increasingly used native plants.

Publications

  • with Wolfgang Oehme: Bold Romantic Gardens. 1990.
  • Gardening with water. 1995.
  • Gardening with Nature. 1997.
  • Architecture in the Garden. 2003.
  • with Thomas Christopher: The Artful Garden. Creative inspiration for Landscape design. Random House, New York 2011.

Gardens

Awards

literature

  • James van Sweden and Thomas Christopher: The Artful Garden. Creative inspiration for Landscape design. Random House, New York 2011.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ James van Sweden and Thomas Christopher: The Artful Garden. Creative inspiration for Landscape design. Random House, New York 2011, pp. Xxiii
  2. ↑ James van Sweden and Thomas Christopher: The Artful Garden. Creative inspiration for Landscape design. Random House, New York 2011, pp. Xxiii
  3. ↑ James van Sweden and Thomas Christopher: The Artful Garden. Creative inspiration for Landscape design. Random House, New York 2011, pp. Xxv
  4. ↑ James van Sweden and Thomas Christopher: The Artful Garden. Creative inspiration for Landscape design. Random House, New York 2011, pp. Xxvi
  5. ↑ James van Sweden and Thomas Christopher: The Artful Garden. Creative inspiration for Landscape design. Random House, New York 2011, p. 69
  6. ↑ James van Sweden and Thomas Christopher: The Artful Garden. Creative inspiration for Landscape design. Random House, New York 2011, pp. Xxviii
  7. ^ Noel Kingsbury, Garden Designers at Home. London, Pavillon Books 2011, 201
  8. ↑ James van Sweden and Thomas Christopher: The Artful Garden. Creative inspiration for Landscape design. Random House, New York 2011, p. 110
  9. ↑ James van Sweden and Thomas Christopher: The Artful Garden. Creative inspiration for Landscape design. Random House, New York 2011, pp. Xxviii
  10. ↑ James van Sweden and Thomas Christopher: The Artful Garden. Creative inspiration for Landscape design. Random House, New York 2011, p. 33
  11. ↑ James van Sweden and Thomas Christopher: The Artful Garden. Creative inspiration for Landscape design. Random House, New York 2011, p. 100
  12. ↑ James van Sweden and Thomas Christopher: The Artful Garden. Creative inspiration for Landscape design. Random House, New York 2011, p. 99
  13. ↑ James van Sweden and Thomas Christopher: The Artful Garden. Creative inspiration for Landscape design. Random House, New York 2011, p. 69
  14. ^ Noel Kingsbury, Garden Designers at Home. London, Pavillon Books 2011, 200
  15. ↑ James van Sweden and Thomas Christopher: The Artful Garden. Creative inspiration for Landscape design. Random House, New York 2011, p. 143
  16. ^ Noel Kingsbury, Garden Designers at Home. London, Pavillon Books 2011, 200
  17. ↑ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/27/arts/design/james-van-sweden-dies-at-78-designs-urged-lawns-to-grow.html?_r=0
  18. ↑ http://noels-garden.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/james-van-sweden-memoir.html
  19. ↑ https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/2013/09/23/93c980ae-23a2-11e3-b75d-5b7f66349852_story.html
  20. ↑ http://dirt.asla.org/2013/09/25/james-van-sweden-father-of-the-new-american-garden-dies/
  21. ↑ James van Sweden and Thomas Christopher: The Artful Garden. Creative inspiration for Landscape design. Random House, New York 2011, p. 189
  22. ↑ https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/2013/09/23/93c980ae-23a2-11e3-b75d-5b7f66349852_story.html
  23. ↑ http://landscapeofmeaning.blogspot.co.uk/p/about-me.html
  24. ^ Noel Kingsbury, Garden Designers at Home. London, Pavillon Books 2011, 201
  25. ^ Noel Kingsbury, Garden Designers at Home. London, Pavillon Books 2011, 201
  26. ↑ James van Sweden and Thomas Christopher: The Artful Garden. Creative inspiration for Landscape design. Random House, New York 2011, p. 16
  27. ↑ James van Sweden and Thomas Christopher: The Artful Garden. Creative inspiration for Landscape design. Random House, New York 2011, p. 16
  28. ↑ James van Sweden and Thomas Christopher: The Artful Garden. Creative inspiration for Landscape design. Random House, New York 2011, p. 25
  29. ↑ James van Sweden and Thomas Christopher: The Artful Garden. Creative inspiration for Landscape design. Random House, New York 2011, p. 67
  30. ↑ James van Sweden and Thomas Christopher: The Artful Garden. Creative inspiration for Landscape design. Random House, New York 2011, p. 133
  31. ^ Noel Kingsbury, Garden Designers at Home. London, Pavillon Books 2011, 205
  32. ↑ James van Sweden and Thomas Christopher: The Artful Garden. Creative inspiration for Landscape design. Random House, New York 2011, p. 134
  33. ^ Noel Kingsbury, Garden Designers at Home. London, Pavillon Books 2011, 200
  34. ↑ http://noels-garden.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/james-van-sweden-memoir.html
  35. ^ Noel Kingsbury, Garden Designers at Home. London, Pavillon Books 2011, 201
  36. ^ Noel Kingsbury, Garden Designers at Home. London, Pavillon Books 2011, 207
  37. ↑ James van Sweden and Thomas Christopher: The Artful Garden. Creative inspiration for Landscape design. Random House, New York 2011, p. 189
personal data
SURNAME Van Sweden, James
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Van Sweden, James Anthony (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American landscape architect
DATE OF BIRTH February 5, 1935
PLACE OF BIRTH Grand Rapids , Michigan
DATE OF DEATH 20th September 2013
Place of death Washington, DC