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Garrett Eckbo, the dean of West Coast landscape architects, died May 14 after suffering a stroke at a retirement home in Oakland. He was 89.
A retired professor of landscape architecture at UC Berkeley, Eckbo was a leader of the modern landscape movement, creating gardens the New York Times once called "the horticultural equivalents of the architecture and furniture of Charles and Ray Eames."
Eckbo designed outdoor spaces for the very poor as well as the very rich. His projects ranged from the grounds for a Central Valley housing project for migrant farm workers to gardens for Hollywood luminaries such as Gary Cooper and Louis B. Mayer.
A native of Cooperstown, N.Y., Eckbo grew up in Alameda, Calif. He studied landscape architecture during the 1930s at UC Berkeley and later at Harvard, where he encountered the modern movement and studied under professors such as Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus.
The Bauhaus influence on Eckbo was profound, reflected in the asymmetrical geometry of his landscape designs.
His first...