OUTSIDE SPACES 095


6pm curfew; the City of Light shut down as Parisian gloom has become – oh, horror – the city of ‘le click-and-collect’, and a grey sadness has settled over it like a fog. In 1983, Saul Bellow wrote, ‘Parisian gloom is not simply climatic. It is a spiritual force that acts not only on building materials, on walls and rooftops, but also on your character, your opinions and your judgment. It is a powerful astringent.’ Paris is far from alone in its deprivations. Almost all major cities across the world have had to endure lost lives, lost jobs, lost ways of life. Each city changes in its own way. In Paris, the hole in its heart is the absence of the


‘Continually patronised by men, [Johnson’s] technique to command attention was to lower her voice: you had to lean in to hear her.’


sensual conviviality that makes people dream. It is the disappearance of pleasures the French have spent centuries refining in the belief there is no limit to them. Life is monotonous. Tere is really nowhere to go. Te number of Parisians going up the Eiffel Tower last year doubled. One of the characteristics of a true Parisian is that they have never ascended it, and yet the pandemic started to change that. All it took was the elimination of alternatives. Te Louvre and Versailles are both closed. Last year, their visitor numbers were down 90%. Te campus at Wellesley College sits in the first actually designed landscape Johnson ever lived in, devised by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr, whose father had designed Central Park, New York. After that, she worked as a tour guide at a wax museum in Florida before going back home to New England to work in a garden nursery on Shady Hill Lane in Bedford. She lived in a shack in the grounds, got to know the landscape architecture students from Harvard, then decided to join them. Once she earned her MA at the Graduate School of Design, she taught at the university for a decade. She also joined one of the most notable firms in post-war modernism, Te Architects Collaborative (TAC), which had been operating in Cambridge, Massachusetts since 1945, and the group that Walter Gropius joined in 1946, two years after he became a US citizen. Johnson stayed for just a year. Her time at TAC can be summed up in a quotation a Washington Post editor once used to describe its reporter Maxine Cheshire: ‘I hired you to look at. It never occurred to me or to anyone else that you had a brain in your head.’ Johnson was very good at her job. Few women were practicing landscape architecture when Johnson founded her firm, Carol R Johnson, in 1959 – when it was just a drafting table in her Cambridge apartment. Te reason she started it, she once said, was so that people would stop yelling at her. Most men at the time did not want to work for a woman, so she ended up hiring sculptors. Bidding on one early job, the Cambridge Common, she thought to bring two male employees with her. She still did not win the commission. A member of the committee that made the decision later told her, ‘We gave it to two good men instead of one good woman.’ Tat was the way it was. She had to fight throughout her professional life against prejudice that was stuck in the 18th century. Nonetheless, she fought back and built one of the largest landscape architecture firms in the country.


Main image The Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway linear park in Boston, Massachusetts was designed in conjunction with Boston’s troubled Big Dig project


Above left Johnson was a pioneering landscape architect


Left The Mystic River Reservation, nestled between Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts


Continually patronised by men, her technique to command attention was to lower her voice: you had to lean in to hear her. Eventually people listened. A lot. She received numerous awards, including the American Society of Landscape Architects’s gold medal, the first woman to do so. Like all successful designers she was often asked to choose her favourite project. She usually mentioned a park in her Cambridge hometown. But, if pressed, as she was by the


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132  |  Page 133  |  Page 134  |  Page 135  |  Page 136  |  Page 137  |  Page 138  |  Page 139  |  Page 140  |  Page 141  |  Page 142  |  Page 143  |  Page 144  |  Page 145  |  Page 146  |  Page 147  |  Page 148  |  Page 149  |  Page 150  |  Page 151  |  Page 152  |  Page 153  |  Page 154  |  Page 155  |  Page 156  |  Page 157  |  Page 158  |  Page 159  |  Page 160  |  Page 161