LongHouse Landscape Legends (August 16)

LONGHOUSE LANDSCAPE LEGENDS
Modernist Landscapes: Visionaries and Their Gardens
Saturday, August 16, 2025 | 9:30 AM - 3:00 PM
Barry Bergdoll | Caleb Smith | William Whitaker

SCHEDULE
9:30-10:00am:  Morning reception
10:00-10:45am: Barry Bergdoll Abstraction and Nature: Gardens in the Work of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier
10:45-11:30am: Garden walks and nibbles
11:30am-12:15pm: Bill Whitaker on Harriet Pattison
12:15pm-1:30pm: Caleb Smith A Modern Mystic: Art and Nature in the Gardens of Russell Page, followed by a conversation with Deborah Nevins
1:30pm: Lunch in the garden

Join us at LongHouse for our annual landscape lecture event, a captivating day of talks exploring the intersection of modernist architecture, landscape design, and cultural history. This year, our special event features renowned scholars Barry Bergdoll, Professor of Art History at Columbia University; Caleb Smith, Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University, and William Whitaker, Curator and Collections Manager of the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design. 

Bergdoll will speak about the landscape visions of iconic modernist architects Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, examining how they considered gardens to extend their vision. Whitaker will speak on Harriet Pattison, the influential landscape designer who, among other notable projects, collaborated on the masterful landscape at The FDR Memorial on Roosevelt Island and the Kimbell Art Museum, which features prominently in her book Our Days Are Like Full Years: A Memoir with Letters from Louis Kahn (2020). Smith will offer an illuminating perspective on the work of Russell Page, reflecting on how the celebrated garden designer’s sensibility bridged classical traditions with modernist innovation. Page recorded his observations and practice in his masterpiece The Education of a Gardener (1962). Set within the modernist setting of LongHouse, our event promises to enrich our understanding of landscape in its relationship to modernism. The LongHouse Landscape Legends program focuses on landscape and design, art and architecture. Designed by Jack Lenor Larson (1927-2020), LongHouse is the perfect place for these conversations, a place that inspires living with art in all forms, where nature and creativity are seamlessly connected, and historic ideas meld with modern concepts, is the perfect place to gather in conversations about the landscapes that define our lives.

About The Speakers

Barry Bergdoll is the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History at Columbia University. He is a renowned scholar of architecture of the 19th and 20th centuries and has written extensively on landscape in the work of masters of modern architecture including Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. From 2007 to 2014 he served as chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art. He was a member of the advisory committee to the library of the New York Botanical Garden and the Mellon Humanities Institute Fellowship Selection Committee from 2014 to 2022.

Caleb Smith is a professor of English and American Studies at Yale University. He began to study the cultural history of landscape design while writing his most recent book, Thoreau's Axe (Princeton University Press 2023) and building his own garden in Connecticut. He has recently published a study of Russell Page in Aeon (October 2023) and lectured about Page for The Garden Conservancy.

William Whitaker is the curator and collections manager of the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design. Trained as an architect and architectural historian, he primarily works on documenting and interpreting Penn’s design collections, including holdings related to the life and work of architect Louis I. Kahn and landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, as well as that of the husband and wife design team of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Photo ©Marina Schinzi; Russell Page garden at Villar Perosa