Landscape architect, born in Rochester, New York, USA. In the 1920s and 1930s he introduced French Modernism to American landscape design, replacing beaux arts formalism with more experimental designs. From his Boston office (192070) he completed some 600 commissions, including Naumkeag in Stockbridge, MA, where he created sweeping vistas with curving walls and sculpted mounds of earth.
Fletcher Steele (June 7, 1885 - July 1971) was an American landscape architect credited with designing and creating over 700 gardens from 1915 to the time of his death.
Steele was born John Fletcher Steele in Rochester, New York, United States to a lawyer father and pianist mother, graduated from Williams College in 1907, and promptly joined the young landscape architecture program at Harvard University where Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.
In 1913 Steele embarked on a four month tour of Europe to study European designs.
His conversion to an Art Deco style began in 1925 when he visited the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (the 'Art Deco Exposition') and saw its examples of cubist gardens with mirrors, concrete and coloured gravel.
Steele's designs and writings of this period were influential during the stylistic transition from Art Deco to Modernism. Rose, to whome Steele showed the possibilities of modern art and the creativity inherent within the design process. Steele's own designs, however, were sufficiently removed from the Modern style so that his works were generally out of fashion until the modern era had passed.
Steele is noted for a number of major works including Naumkeag, Ancrum House, Whitney Allen House, Standish Backus House, Turner House, Lisborne Grange.
These projects were not all viewed with high regard at the time, and only relatively recently have historians begun to appreciate Steele's impact on garden design and landscape architecture.
Steele is interred in the Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York. a comprehensive guide, æsthetic and practical, for all garden lovers, both those who are still planning their gardens on paper and those who have had gardening experience, including plant lists compiled with the help of horticulturalists in all sections of the country, and an introductory chapter on garden design by Fletcher Steele, Boston, The Atlantic monthly press, 1926.
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