Christopher Tunnard

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).

Biography

Christopher Tunnard was the son of Christopher Coney Tunnard (1879-1939), second son of Charles Thomas Tunnard of Frampton House, near Boston, Lincolnshire (now a Residential care home) and Madeline Kingscote (b. 7 Jul 1881, d. Jan 1977). 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).

Born and educated in Victoria, British Columbia, where his Lincolnshire-born father had moved as a young man, in 1929 Christopher Tunnard went to England and obtained a Diploma from the Royal Horticultural Society in 1930.

From 1932-1935 he worked as a garden designer for Percy Cane, an exponent of the Arts and Crafts movement. He then embarked on a European tour, becoming interested in avant-garde art and architecture. In 1936, he started his own practice for landscape architecture in London.

His noted landscape projects include his landscape architecture for Serge Chermayeff's house Bentley Wood at Halland, Sussex; 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.

Christopher Tunnard was drafted into the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1943 and after the war took a job teaching city planning at Yale. Enjoying the work, he did little further garden design, and reached the post of professor and chairman of the department of city planning. His publications in this area include articles such as ''America's super-cities'' 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.

Landscape architecture and garden design

One of Tunnard's main projects was Chermayeff's Bentley Wood in Halland Sussex in 1928. This project was shown in Architectural Review and his book Gardens in the Modern Landscape. In describing the gardens surrounding the building, Tunnard refers to them as to being in perfect harmony. The thinning of the trees left shaded lawn that gradually led up to the house and left room for daffodils and evergreens. 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, than merely as a formal garden.

Design philosophy

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

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