Кристофер Таннард: Архитектор ландшафтов и градостроитель.

Canadian born landscape architect, garden designer, city planner, and author (1910– 1979)

Arthur Coney Tunnard (1910 in Victoria, British Columbia – 1979), later known as Christopher Tunnard, was a Canadian born landscape architect, garden designer, city planner, and author of Gardens in the Modern Landscape (1938).

Christopher Tunnard was the son of Christopher Coney Tunnard, second son of Charles Thomas Tunnard of Frampton House, near Boston, Lincolnshire (now a Residential care home) and Madeline Kingscote. He had one younger brother, Peter Kingscote Tunnard (b. 11 December 1919, d. 16 March 1940), who died at age 20. Tunnard's uncle was John Charles Tunnard (b. 1873) whose only son was British surrealist artist John Tunnard (1900–1971). Another uncle was Thomas Monkton Tunnard (b. 1882) of Birtles Hall, vicar of Over Alderley, who married Grace Cook and fathered pianist Viola Mary Tunnard (1916–1974), Thomas Newburgh Tunnar (b. 1919) and gallery owner Peter Humphrey Tunnard (b. 1920). and for his modification of existing 18th century gardens at the circular Art Deco St Ann's Court (a Grade II* Listed Building) in Chertsey designed by Raymond McGrath, where Tunnard lived for a short time with his then partner, the stockbroker GL Schlesinger. He wrote a series of articles for the Architectural Review, later re published as a manifesto, Gardens in the Modern Landscape. In 1939, he designed the garden for the "All Europe House" at the Ideal Home Exhibition, Earls Court. In the same year he emigrated to America, at the invitation of Walter Gropius, to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. From 1938 to 1943 Tunnard taught at Harvard. While in Massachusetts, he designed several gardens for modern houses, photos and/or drawings of which he later published in the second edition of his book in 1948. Among them were a small courtyard garden for the Koch House in Cambridge by Edward D. Stone and Carl Koch; planning with Koch the early modern residential development at Snake Hill Road in Belmont; and a garden for an expansive rural site in Lincoln with a new house by architect G. Holmes Perkins, who was on the Harvard faculty with Tunnard. During the 1943/44 academic year, Tunnard lived in the Greenwich Village with his mother Madeline Kingscote. Madeline had moved to New York City to be near her other son, Peter Kingscote, who was with the Michael Chekhov's Theatre Studio at Ridgefield, CT, 40 miles away. Peter was an aspiring poet and short stories writer, but his career was cut short when he died just 20 years old in mid 1940. and a number of books on city design in the U. S. The best known may be Man made America: Chaos or Control? (1963), by Tunnard and Boris Pushkarev, which won the 1964 National Book Award in Science, Philosophy and Religion. In 1969 Yale disciplined him by demotion for sending out unauthorized admission letters to prospective students, following an unresolved departmental dispute. It is not a formal garden. The trees are formed in relation to the house in groups or by themselves. This is a concept that Tunnard describes as "letting space flow by breaking down division between usable areas and incidentally increasing their usability." Another of Tunnard's projects was at Galby Leicestershire House, in collaboration with architect Raymond McGrath. The building materials for the house were chosen to fit in with the scenery. For example, some remnants of the former great estates of Beaudesert were used to build the new building. In addition, Tunnard wanted the garden to be interpreted as a link between the house and the open landscape, not merely as a formal garden.

Tunnard came to England in a period when garden design was strongly influenced by the work of Edwin Lutyens, Gertrude Jekyll and Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott. The eclectic Arts and Crafts movement was drawing on this background to focus on garden features such as crazy paving, pergolas, sundials, sunken pools and statuary. Tunnard viewed this as "romantic trivialisation" of garden design and in reaction spearheaded a Modernist approach to landscape design, which he expressed in the polemical Gardens in the Modern Landscape. His approach avoided decoration, sentimentality and classical allusion in favour of functional minimalist designs. For instance, his acclaimed landscape for Chermayeff's Bentley Wood house, itself Modernist, simply thinned the surrounding woodland and replanted areas with drifts of daffodils. His writings influenced a further generation of designers such as Thomas Dolliver Church.

First published as a series of articles in Architectural Review from October 1937 to September 1938, Gardens in the Modern Landscape significantly challenged the then current views of landscape architecture. Geoffrey Jellicoe reviewed Gardens in the Modern Landscape in the magazine Architecture Review and overall gave a great praise to Tunnard's work. As it debunks previous and most accepted styles of landscape architecture, Tunnard meets with new nature, and questioning and breaking apart most widely accepted conventions, such as symmetry and the containment of the garden to a picture. He described the book as "if you can take the jolts you will be pleasantly introduced to the brave new world of landscape," referring the jolts as this challenge to current conventions. In sum, Jellicoe reviews the new landscape that Tunnard describes as having a response from readers as either "shocked from it altogether, or carried off their feet with enthusiasm." Lawrence Halprin cites Gardens in the Modern Landscape as a revelation for him and his future career. From the book, the most enduring idea for Halprin being "A garden is a work of art, and it remains a vision for guidance as one tries to extend the garden’s benefits of rest, recreation, and aesethic pleasure to a wider public, in the larger landscape." Walker 150 Moreover, Halprin wanted to study under Tunnard. For his graduate studies, he went to the GSD at Harvard and under Tunnard and other influential men, Halprin studied landscape architecture. Later, with Tunnard, Halprin produced an issue of Task magazine. Walker, Peter, and Melanie Simo. Fletcher Steele, noted landscape architect, agrees with Tunnard's views of modern building design, but pointed out that Tunnard's views as being another style and not a possible universal conception.

Tunnard's latter years were spent away from landscape architecture. He taught at Yale University for city planning, became more focused on preserving historic buildings, and wrote many books on urban planning. He became one of the founders of the New Haven Preservation Trust in the early 1960s. Eckbo stated that landscape architecture lost a great man when Tunnard went into city planning.