The Modern Landscapes of Ted Smyth

The modern period in landscape architecture is enjoying fascinated appreciation from scholars and historians in Europe and the Americas, with new themes, new subjects, and new appraisals appearing. The Modern Landscapes of Ted Smyth contributes to the conversation by focusing on the work of a singular designer who spent his entire career in a province of the North Island of New Zealand. Ted Smyth practised an assured landscape modernism without ever seeing the designs of his forebears or contemporaries working in the UK, Europe, and the United States. Designing in isolation from the mainstream of modernism, and a little after its high tide, Smyth produced a series of gardens that provoke a revaluation of the diffusionist model of influence.

The book explains and describes the evolution of Smyth’s design vocabulary and relates it to the development of tropical landscape modernism in other Asia-Pacific sites. It shows how a culture of garden modernism can be generated from within a particular locale, and highlights Smyth’s engagement with Māori design traditions in search of a specific expression of the high modern essentialism of place.