Carol R. Johnson.
Carol RJohnson Associates Inc.
Carol R. Johnson credits her parents with instilling in her a lifelong passion for the outdoors. Carol’s father, a lawyer, and her mother, a school principal, were avid and skilled gardeners who frequently talked to her about plants and nature.
Born in a northern New Jersey suburb on September 6, 1926, Carol loved the Johnson family vacations to a farm in Vermont, where she would climb trees, hike, and camp out. The family also vacationed at a lake house on the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard. Carol’s memories of walking along the beach and exploring Gaylord Cliffs, where Native Americans used to live, created a nature-and-culture connection in her mind that has stayed with Carol her entire life.
In her childhood, Carol exhibited a strong entrepreneurial spirit. She recalled her ambition in a 2006 interview with the Cultural Landscape Foundation, “My 11-year-old brother started a neighborhood newspaper called the Boulevard Bugle when he got a duplicator for Christmas one year. We lived on Midland Boulevard. His friends and I were the reporters and the delivery people. After four years, I took over. I increased the circulation from 20 to 400 and actually made money on advertising.”
Carol also loved to write poems, and many of them were about large features of the landscape. One poem was about the Bayonne Bridge, which connected New Jersey and New York and opened when Carol was three. At the time, the bridge was the largest steel-construction arch bridge in the world.
Later, Carol attended Wellesley College, whose campus was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the leading landscape designer of the time. She was aware of the effect that the design had on the students’ mentality. She studied botany in college but majored in English.
After graduating from Wellesley in 1951, Carol took off to Europe with a friend. They biked, camped, and saw wonderful things. Carol loved seeing people going about their daily activities and fitting into the urban and the rural landscapes. They saw Hampton Court in Great Britain and the Palace of Versailles in France, but Carol’s experiences sleeping outdoors in sleeping bags, biking, and finding her way were just as important for her future as a landscape architect as seeing the classic buildings. She gained a true appreciation for landscapes, which may have sparked her later interest in landscape architecture.
When Carol returned from Europe, she found work at a commercial nursery in Bedford, Massachusetts. She created plant propagations (cuttings that grew new plants) and sold plants to people living in the Boston suburbs. She lived in a little shack on the property, located near the Concord-Bedford railway, which was an alleged escape route for inmates from the Concord Reformatory. Carol was often exhausted from working in the fields all day and would go to bed early. One night she was lying in bed and heard voices outside. She worried that they might have been the inmates from the nearby reformatory. Then she heard someone yell her name, and she finally came out after deciding that they were most likely not inmates. She soon learned that her visitors were students from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design who were taking a summer course in plant materials. They had heard from a classmate about Carol’s expansive knowledge and wanted to learn about plants from her.
“We lit a bonfire and talked over what I was doing and what they were doing and they suggested that I might study landscape architecture,” Carol said when asked how she became connected with the landscape architecture program at Harvard.
Carol was admitted to Harvard’s Graduate School of Design on the condition that she take a makeup math class there. Some friends had recommended that she read the book Space, Time and Architecture by Sigfried Giedion, and she was excited when she later discovered that the book’s author would be teaching one of her classes. Carol loved studying under Giedion, and she thrived at Harvard, in part because she said Harvard was “a sort of intimate place and people looked after you and you knew everyone, and you were really part of the whole thing.” At Harvard, Carol gained confidence and a keen understanding of design.
At first there were just four women in the architecture program, and Carol was the only woman student in the architectural landscape program. Her second year, however, there were so many women in the landscape program that there wasn’t enough room for all of the students to work in the main studio. The administration moved the women to a smaller, out-of-the-way studio in Hunt Hall. Several women felt that this was an obviously sexist move, but Carol and many of her friends just felt lucky to be students at Harvard.
Carol graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1957, during the postwar baby boom. A lot of schools were being built to accommodate the new children, and Carol got a job with Whitman & Howard, an engineering firm doing site planning for many schools. The next year, she worked for the Architects Collaborative (TAC). One of her projects was the landscape design for the gatehouse at Baghdad University. She stayed up all night to complete the grading of the foundation and the layout so that building could begin quickly.
Carol explained, “TAC was pretty nifty for women in those days because Norman Fletcher’s wife was an architect and she was a partner. Chip Harkness’s wife was an architect and she was a partner. So, there was no question that women were a part of the scene at TAC.”
Given that TAC was an architecture office, its focus was not on landscape design, and Carol felt she was not being fully supported. She thought that the building was getting all the attention, while she was more concerned with the landscape. She started moonlighting as a landscape designer for family friends, working every evening and all weekend. Since her landscape design freelance work began taking up all of her time, she decided to quit working at TAC and do her own thing.
For the first five years of Carol’s landscaping practice, her drafting room was in her apartment. Then she moved to a “very sweet little office” in Harvard Square, where for many years, Carol’s dog went to work with her every day.
Carol recalled her first time bidding on an independent project. “I was terrorized because it was my first interview as a prime consultant for a landscape project. I worried that they didn’t give jobs like that to women, and they wouldn’t give one to me,” she recalled. Carol came up with a strategy: she brought her two male employees with her so that the client would take her seriously. Still, the male-owned firm won the job. A woman on the deciding board later told Carol that they gave the job to “two good men rather than one good woman.” And Carol thought that it was the men that she had to prove herself to!
Carol (left) reviewing a plan with project team members.
Carol R. Johnson Associates Inc.
Still, Carol wasn’t deterred from her dream career. Her practice started to take off after she completed a project for a church, then a swimming pool, followed by gardens for some fast-growing subdivisions. Then, Carol hit the big time when the architecture firm Cambridge Seven Associates asked her to design the landscape for the new Buckminster Fuller dome at the American Pavilion for Expo ‘67 in Montreal. Carol flew around the Canadian countryside, selecting trees from farmers for her design.
Many of Carol’s early projects involved the energy industry and the environment. For the Chevron Oil Refinery in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, she designed plantings and buffers, and also came up with a color palette that camouflaged the facility into its environment. She invented a color called dawn grey, which was used on the entire refinery to blend the structures perfectly with the skies. Still, growing her fledgling business wasn’t easy. She said, “I had a hard time getting even part-time employees. I was an unknown woman, and there were plenty of jobs with famous men.”
During those early days, Carol flew frequently to Washington, DC, for meetings and she was usually the only woman on those flights. Now when she flies down there, she says, the plane is filled with businesswomen.
A detailed view of the quadrangle entrance at Agnes Scott College, designed by Carol Johnson.
Carol R. Johnson Associates Inc.
In 1915, Florence Yoch graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a landscape architecture degree. After returning to her home state of California, she began practicing landscape design in 1918, and she completed more than 250 projects in 53 years. Her projects included grand estates for Hollywood figures including producers Jack Warner and David O. Selznick and director George Cukor, college campuses, parks, and even a botanical garden. Florence also created the landscape designs for the classic movie Gone with the Wind, built on a studio set in Los Angeles with a budget
Carol R. Johnson Associates Inc. has worked on a wide range of projects including college campuses, cemeteries, gyms, commercial and corporate landscapes, historic preservation, parks, and land restoration. Carol explained in her oral history, “My own work has been said to possess simplicity, elegance, quiet surprises, and clarity.”
Additionally, Carol has gained a reputation for designing landscapes that accommodate people with disabilities. She has a unique philosophy: “I want to make the accessible route so interesting and appealing that the ‘able bodied’ will find some value in using it as well. I don’t like to have something pushed off to the side, sort of in the backyard for the accessible route.”
Carol became a fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) in 1982, and in 1998 she was the first American woman to receive the ASLA Gold Medal. Her firm celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2009 and has become one of the largest landscape architectural firms in the United States, with clients around the world. In her oral history, Carol wanted to start by explaining what she loves about landscape architecture: “You can learn so much when you are a landscape architect. There’s a diversity of focus and opportunities for artistic expression in three dimensions.”
“You can learn so much when you are a landscape architect. There’s a diversity of focus and opportunities for artistic expression in three dimensions.”
In a 2010 interview for Landscape Architecture magazine, she explained her thoughts on the current state of landscape architecture. She said, “I am surprised at the increasing interest in landscape architecture among the types of people I run into—it has become a much more visible profession than it used to be.”
In 1993, Carol turned management of her firm over to her partners for them to lead the company in further growth. Carol R. Johnson Associates Inc. now has offices in Boston; Knoxville, Tennessee; and Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Now in her 80s, Carol still works where and when the client has asked for her specifically to design the project. Now that she finally has time to take vacations, Carol enjoys traveling to places like Kenya, Grenada, Rome, Florence, Nepal, Vietnam, France, and Moscow.
Engineer Judy Nitsch threw an 80th birthday party for Carol in 2008. Many leaders of women-owned companies were invited. When asked about their relationship, Carol said, “I always knew who she was although I hadn’t met her. After I started my business, I decided to call her and see if she’d meet with me—she did! She was generous with her advice, and to this day we refer to and adhere to her advice on certain things.”
LEARN MORE
Landscape Legends: Carol Johnson Oral History Interview. The Cultural Landscape Foundation, 2006, http://tclf.org/sites/default/files/pioneers/johnson_carol/videos/index.html
Principles of Ecological Landscape Design by Travis Beck (Island Press, 2013)
“Shared Wisdom” by Jane Roy Brown, Interview with Carol R. Johnson, Landscape Architecture, December 2010