Definitions and examples of modern landscape architecture arrived decades after their formulation in architecture and the plastic arts. As both author/theorists and practitioners, Christopher Tunnard in England (later in the United States) and Sutemi Horiguchi in Japan were central to the formation of modern landscape design and thinking in their respective countries, demonstrating that even vegetal and traditional building materials could assume a guise more in accord with contemporary life. Interestingly, aspects of national identity were used in the United Kingdom and Japan to argue both for and against modern architecture and landscape design. This book examines the formation, ideas, and works of these two principals as well as other landscape figures working in those two countries from the 1930s to the 1960s with the sub-theme of creating a "national modernism".

Marc Treib earned bachelor's and master's degrees in architecture, and a master's in design. He has taught architectural design, drawing, special topics seminars, and courses on Scandinavian and Japanese architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. Over nearly four decades of teaching, his interests broadened to include landscape architecture, and over the last twenty years his writing has centered on landscape architecture, regional architecture, and the intersection of architecture, art, and landscape design. Since leaving full-time teaching, he has been writing and lecturing on a range of subjects reflecting these interests. The current project derives from parallel interests in Japanese architecture and gardens, and the advent of modernism in Western landscape architecture. In this case, the two protagonists, Christopher Tunnard and Sutemi Horiguchi (though they never met), represent intriguing parallels in their respective countries, as well as their intersection in Tunnard's classic manifest Gardens in the Modern Landscape.