Geraldine "Gerry" Knight Scott (July 16, 1904 – August 2, 1989) was a California

landscape architect A landscape architect is a person who is educated in the field of landscape architecture. The practice of landscape architecture includes: site analysis, site inventory, site planning, land planning, planting design, grading, storm water manage ...

. She taught landscape architecture at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

and was a Fellow of the

American Society of Landscape Architects The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) is a professional association for landscape architects in the United States. The ASLA's mission is to advance landscape architecture through advocacy, communication, education, and fellowship. ...

. She was a founding member of the California Horticultural Society and received various awards and honors.''Geraldine Knight Scott, 1904-1989, a woman in landscape architecture in California, 1926-1989'' (Bancroft Library oral history transcript, retrieved 14 July 201

/ref>Lowell, Waverly. ''Biography of Geraldine Knight Scott''. The Cultural Landscape Foundation. 2011. retrieved 14 July 2013

Education

Geraldine Knight was born in

Wallace, Idaho Wallace, Idaho is a city in and the county seat of Shoshone County, Idaho, Shoshone County, Idaho, in the Silver Valley (Idaho), Silver Valley mining district of the Idaho Panhandle. Founded in 1884, Wallace sits alongside the South Fork of the C ...

. She moved to the

San Francisco Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a List of regions of California, region of California surrounding and including San Francisco Bay, and anchored by the cities of Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose, California, S ...

to live with relatives after her parents died. She decided in high school to become a landscape architect and enrolled in

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkele ...

's College of Agriculture in 1922. She received a degree in Landscape Architecture in 1926. Disappointed by the heavy emphasis on science and lack of art and design that the Berkeley’s College of Agriculture provided, Scott attended art and architecture classes at Cornell University from 1926 to 1928.Laurie, Michael. ''Geraldine Knight Scott, Landscape Architecture: Berkeley''. University of California, Calisphere. 2011. Accessed 5 Mar 2015

/ref>

Career

In 1928, Scott began her professional career in Southern California in the office of A.E. Hanson. Over the next two years she worked on various residential gardens and estates including the Harold Lloyd Estate in

Beverly Hills Beverly Hills is a city located in Los Angeles County, California, United States. A notable and historic suburb of Los Angeles, it is located just southwest of the Hollywood Hills, approximately northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Beverly Hil ...

. In 1930, Scott embarked on a tour of Europe. She spent nearly two years abroad surveying historic Italian villas through the

Accademia delle Arti Accademia (Italian for "academy") often refers to: * The Galleria dell'Accademia, an art museum in Florence * The Gallerie dell'Accademia, an art museum in Venice Accademia may also refer to: Academies of art * The Accademia Carrara di Belle ...

in Rome and visiting the famous gardens of France and Spain. She also attended the Sorbonne in Paris studying housing projects in Austria and Germany. Scott returned to California in 1932 and unable to find work due to the Great Depression, returned to UC Berkeley where she studied painting with Japanese artist

Chiura Obata was a well-known Japanese-American artist and popular art teacher. A self-described "roughneck", Obata went to the United States in 1903, at age 17. After initially working as an illustrator and commercial decorator, he had a successful career ...

. In 1933, she joined Helen Van Pelt’s office in Marin County and took color theory classes with Rudolph Schaeffer at the Rudolph Schaeffer School of Design. In 1939 she married Los Angeles journalist Mellier G. Scott, with whom she shared a strong interest in urban and regional planning issues. After a trip to view housing projects in Europe, they returned to Los Angeles and Scott became the director of the Citizens Housing Council to promote public housing. She also became the first female member of the Los Angeles Regional Planning Commission where she worked on recreational planning and war housing. Both Scott and her husband became actively involved in

Telesis Telesis (from the Greek τέλεσις /telesis/) or "planned progress" was a concept and neologism coined by the American sociologist Lester Frank Ward (often referred to as the "father of American sociology"), in the late 19th century to descr ...

, a group of designers and planners interested in the social impacts of architecture and landscape design that had formed in Northern California. They started a "Telesis South" group "to try to think through better ways of planning for the future." This group organized an exhibition to promote and demonstrate their ideas at the Los Angeles County Museum, as the San Francisco group had done at the

San Francisco Museum of Art The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum and nonprofit organization located in San Francisco, California. SFMOMA was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th-century art, and has b ...

. In 1941 the Scotts moved to

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland, Cali ...

where they participated in the San Francisco Telesis Group and served on the San Francisco Housing and Planning Commission. The involvement with Telesis and her wartime work inspired Geraldine to continue working in the public sector. “Going back to doing private work did not have very great appeal after that,” she said. Scott opened a private landscape architecture practice in 1948, with a focus on site planning and integrating the existing landscape into the project. Her work included housing, schools, and office park landscapes, as well as private gardens. Her talent for visual combinations of plants and knowledge of California flora led landscape architect

Daniel Urban Kiley Daniel Urban Kiley (2 September 1912 – 21 February 2004) was an American landscape architect, who worked in the style of modern architecture. Kiley designed over one-thousand landscape projects including Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis ...

to invite Scott to join his design team for the

Oakland Museum of California Oakland is a city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S. state of California. It is the county seat and most populous city in Alameda County, California, Alameda County, with a population of 440,646 in 2020. A major We ...

garden as a horticultural consultant in 1963. Acting as the local landscape architect, Scott was in charge of plant selection and numerous other horticultural and construction related details. She and colleague

Mai Arbegast Mai Haru Kitazawa Arbegast (1922–2012) was an American landscape architect, and professor based in Berkeley, California. She was a professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Berkeley. She was the first acting director Blake ...

helped to preserve, protect, and later restore the gardens after they had fallen into disrepair.

Teaching

She began teaching part-time at UC Berkeley in the Department of Landscape Architecture in 1952. Her classes covered site planning, planting, and design, and integrated sculpture, painting, and dance as tools for seeing and feeling space before articulating it with trees and shrubs. She also emphasized the physical characteristics of plants – color, shape, size, and texture – as design tools. In 1962, the Landscape Architecture Department asked Scott to manage the newly acquired Blake Estate. She completed a long-range plan for the gardens in 1964 and developed them into an important field education resource. Scott continued to teach and practice concurrently until her retirement in 1968.

Legacy

Scott’s most notable projects include the Pacific House at the

Golden Gate International Exposition The Golden Gate International Exposition (GGIE) was a World's Fair held at Treasure Island in San Francisco, California, U.S. The exposition operated from February 18, 1939, through October 29, 1939, and from May 25, 1940, through September 29, ...

(1939), the Daphne Funeral Home in San Francisco (1953), the Oakland Museum of California (1963), and Blake Garden (Kensington, California) (1964). Scott participated on many civic commissions and boards, including seven years on the Berkeley Civic Art Commission. She was a founding member of the California Horticultural Society (1935), joined the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) in 1937, and was elected an ASLA Fellow in 1972. She served on the ASLA task force on women in landscape architecture from 1974–75, and in 1981 she was elected to distinguished membership of the

Sigma Lambda Alpha honor society Sigma ( ; uppercase Σ, lowercase σ, lowercase in word-final position ς; ) is the eighteenth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 200. In general mathematics, uppercase Σ is used as an operator ...

. Scott made two substantial bequests to the Department of Landscape Architecture at UC Berkeley: a traveling fellowship program for students, and an endowment for research into the history of landscape architecture, including augmenting, cataloguing, and maintaining the landscape architecture archives in the documents collection, now the Environmental Design Archives, of the College of Environmental Design.

Selected bibliography

* Bobrow, Claire Wrenn. ''Geraldine Knight Scott: Art and the Landscape Architect''. University of California, Berkeley: Department of Landscape Architecture, 1993. * Lowell, Waverly, Elizabeth Byrne, and Carrie L. McDade, ed. ''Landscape at Berkeley: The First 100 Years.'' Regents of the University of California and the College of Environmental Design, 2013. * Lowell, Waverly B. ''Living Modern: A Biography of Greenwood Common''. Richmond, CA: William Stout Publishers, c. 2009. * Mozingo, Louise A. ''Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes'', Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011.

References

External links

Environmental Design Archives
- Geraldine Knight Scott Collection
Online Archive of California
- Geraldine Knight Scott Finding Aid {{DEFAULTSORT:Scott, Geraldine 1904 births 1989 deaths American landscape architects UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design alumni Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning alumni Rudolph Schaeffer School of Design alumni