Martha Schwartz.
Courtesy of Martha Schwartz Partners
Martha Schwartz always wanted to be an artist. As a child, she took art classes on Saturday mornings in the basement of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and afterward she would roam the halls. Her favorite place to visit in the museum was the Japanese teahouse and garden, which felt almost magical. Set deep within the museum in a softly lit room, the teahouse had a calm, trancelike effect on the young girl. She also loved wandering the greenhouses at Longwood Gardens on the du Pont Estate in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. She imagined living in a house made out of nature. Her bed would be set atop a huge carpet of grass so that she could wake up and step upon fresh grass when she awoke.
One of six daughters, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on November 21, 1950, Martha comes from a family filled with creative people. Her great-grandfathers came from Russia and Romania in the beginning of the 20th century and expressed their artistry through their work as tailors. Many family members are architects, including her father, sister, uncle, cousin, and son, as well as her husband and many close friends. Other branches of the family tree are filled with graphic designers, painters, engineers, and even a few psychologists.
Martha’s father ran an architectural office in Philadelphia designing high-rise housing projects. On the floor of his office, Martha would play with old, dried-out Magic Markers and broken toilet templates—standard architecture tools to help draftsmen outline toilets on floor plans. Surrounded by boring catalogs of doorjambs and window jambs and strict project time lines, Martha knew that it was not the environment that she wanted to work in when she grew up.
Growing up, Martha mainly went to Quaker schools in addition to those art classes she took at the Philadelphia College of Art during high school. After graduating from high school, Martha majored in printmaking at the School of Architecture and Design at the University of Michigan. She became intrigued by artists who were outside the New York gallery scene and creating large, landscape-inspired sculptures. Artists such as Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Mary Miss, and Richard Long were creating art in their natural environments and introducing a new environmental awareness to viewers. Martha especially loved Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, which was built entirely out of natural materials (mud, water, rocks, and salt crystals) found on the northeastern short of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. She was drawn to how the landscape-inspired sculpture worked with the environment to simultaneously make a piece of art, while drawing attention to the land itself.
After five years in the fine arts department at the University of Michigan, Martha decided to enroll in the university’s three-year landscape architecture graduate program so she could focus on environmental art. But Martha soon discovered that most students were in the landscape program to save the environment, and only one other student was an art student. When she asked to take extra art classes, her request was denied. The chairman of the school at that time did not think that art had anything to do with landscape architecture.
In 1973, Martha worked as a summer intern at the landscape planning and design firm SWA Group. The firm was located in Sausalito, near San Francisco, and was founded by Peter Walker, one of the leaders of the landscape architecture movement. Martha recalled how, at the first meeting with all the interns, Peter berated them for doing what was expected rather than bringing anything of interest or value to the world. When the students were invited to dinner at Peter’s house, Martha was shocked to see a painting by abstract artist Frank Stella on the wall. Martha reflected later, “I was completely dumbfounded that a landscape architect would know anything about contemporary art—and minimalism to boot. He was the first landscape architect I had met who made any connection to the art world. And, given his stature in the profession, his opinion that art was somehow related to landscape architecture greatly reassured me that perhaps I might find a home within the profession.”
“I was completely dumbfounded that a landscape architect would know anything about contemporary art.”
In the winter of 1978, after transferring to the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where Peter was teaching, Martha experienced another pivotal moment. Peter took the class to Vermont to visit modernist landscape architect Dan Kiley. Dan showed the class slides of the work of André Le Nôtre, the 17th-century French gardener of King Louis XIV. Le Nôtre designed the very formal gardens at the Palace of Versailles, among many others. Martha explained her reaction: “I was so knocked out by these images that I could hardly control myself. I had just seen a landscape that was intentional, did not look like nature, was minimal to an extreme, and was so huge that it ate everything around it. It was more beautiful than the Grand Canyon. It all came together in that moment.”
While Martha experienced a transformation in relation to her artwork, so too did her relationship change with her beloved teacher: Peter Walker and Martha were married in 1979. By then, Martha felt strongly that she wanted to express her artistic side in her work. Thinking and scheming about the design of her own front yard was making her happy. She had never created an art installation (an artwork displayed in a large space), and she knew that it had to be done with very little money since she was paying for it herself. Afraid that Peter would turn down her idea of designing an installation for their front yard, Martha decided to keep it a secret. She set up her work materials in the attic of their home, which Peter rarely entered, and when he left for a trip, Martha quickly set to work. In the center of the front-yard garden, she planted a grid of bright pink geraniums surrounded by boxwood hedges. Then, Martha placed eight dozen bagels, which she had secretly dipped in varnish in their attic, in a double row on the ground between the rows of hedges. When Peter arrived home that evening, he was greeted by Martha and their friends who where there for a party in their new Bagel Garden.
During the party, Martha asked a friend if he would mind taking pictures of the project. She was later encouraged to send the photos to Landscape Architecture magazine. Though Martha didn’t expect a response from the magazine, the editor replied that he wanted to publish a photo of the Bagel Garden and asked if Martha would write an article about the design. In a less than serious tone, Martha wrote about how the bagel was an appropriate landscape material because it was cheap and easy to install, was a democratic material, did well in the shade, and didn’t need watering.
When the article was published it created quite a stir in the landscape community. In a bold move by the editor, the photo was highlighted on the front cover. Many magazine subscribers, who felt that the Bagel Garden was below the dignity of the profession, cancelled their memberships. Though the editor of the magazine was fired, the publication of the Bagel Garden article made Martha an instant star. The following month, the magazine’s editorial section overflowed with a heated debate about the garden. Some designers, who were working hard to take the profession to new levels, felt that the work set the field of landscape architecture back 20 years. Others felt that the garden was a breath of fresh air in a design community that was becoming stale.
The publication of the Bagel Garden article marked the first time a landscape design project earned star status based not on the garden design but on the garden as an art image. This changed the face of landscape architecture from something more traditional to an exciting, energetic, and growing field. Critics point out that just because a project gets a lot of press and exposure that does not mean that it is good design. Other fields like architecture and fashion don’t have a problem with showing off their designs.
“I’ve always wanted to make the point that it’s possible to have children, to be a woman, and to kick butt at work.”
From then on, Martha continued making unique statements combining contemporary art and landscapes. In a daylong installation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to celebrate May Day 1980, Martha arranged Necco Wafers candy in a geometric pattern using a 17th-century French formal garden theme. An Ultimate Frisbee tournament took place in the garden later in the day, after installation was complete. In Martha’s design for Atlanta’s Rio Shopping Center, she used more than 350 golden frogs. Her “landscapes” typically comprise sidewalks, roads, shopping malls, byways, highways, and parking lots—the areas that surround the buildings in cities—rather than the traditional definition of landscape: forests, oceans, rivers, sand dunes, prairies, and natural spaces.
Marina Linear Park, San Diego, California, 1988.
Courtesy of Martha Schwartz Partners
In the 1990s, Martha and Peter had two sons, Jake and Joseph. With that addition, Martha’s studios had to function as living space too. She explained, “It’s the only way I knew how to combine work and family. I’ve always wanted to make the point that it’s possible to have children, to be a woman, and to kick butt at work.”
When Martha and Peter divorced in 2000, Martha kept primary custody of the kids, and her sons essentially grew up in her office. These days, Jake has his own successful architectural practice in Beijing, and Joseph is an actor. Now remarried, Martha is raising a daughter in the studio home with her new husband, Markus Jatsch.
In 2005, Martha designed the Grand Canal Square in Dublin, one of the largest paved public spaces in the city. It has been called the most innovative landscape design to be built in Dublin. The central pathway of the plaza is lined with 25-foot-tall red, glowing, angled light sticks made of a newly developed red resin-glass material. When asked to explain the space, Martha says, “The use of light and space lures the public to Grand Canal Square, creating an interactive space that functions as a social magnet during the day and night…. In addition, the fact that it opens onto a large, nontidal body of water makes it a unique space for Ireland.”
Today, women are influencing the profession of landscape architecture more than ever before. Women in the Dirt is a 2012 documentary focusing on the work of seven contemporary, award-winning designers who have made their mark in the field: Mia Lerher, Andrea Cochran, Cheryl Barton, Isabelle Greene, Katherine Spitz, Pamela Palmer, and Lauren Melendrez. Each woman has made great contributions to the field, while sharing a passion for sustainability and enduring design.
Grand Canal Square, Dublin, Ireland, 2005.
Courtesy of Martha Schwartz Partners
Initially labeled l’enfant terrible (the terrible child) of landscape architecture for her Bagel Garden, Martha is now considered the “mother of innovation.” Calling on the influence of important pop artists such as Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns, she uses bright colors and manmade materials to mix pop-art elements with modernism and cubism into her work. She also credits her “pretty funny family” as a source for the humor in her work. Martha’s many awards include the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award and the Women in Design Award for Excellence from the Boston Society of Architects.
With more than 30 years of experience as a landscape architect and artist, Martha is currently principal at Martha Schwartz Partners, which has offices in the United States, United Kingdom, and China. Her projects span 20 countries and four continents.
Of her work, Martha says, “Although my interests have broadened and deepened over time, I am still guided by the desire to make cities that speak to people, draw them in and make them feel. My focus is primarily on cities because that’s where the greatest populations live—by 2050, 78 percent of the world’s population will be living in cities. To make cities appealing, and therefore sustainable, they have to be places where people can work, relax, and enjoy a beautiful surrounding.”
LEARN MORE
Of Gardens by Paula Deitz (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011)
Recycling Spaces: Curating Urban Evolution: The Work of Martha Schwartz Partners by Emily Waugh and Martha Schwartz (ORO Editions, 2012)
The Vanguard Landscapes and Gardens of Martha Schwartz edited by Tim Richardson (Thanes & Hudson, 2004)
Women in the Dirt: Landscape Architects Shaping Our World directed by Carolann Stoney (Wind Media Productions, 2011)