Hare & Hare, Landscape Architects and City Planners - (Critical Perspectives in the History of Environmental Design) (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

When Sidney J. Hare (1860-1938) and S. Herbert Hare (1888-1960) launched their Kansas City firm in 1910, they founded what would become the most influential landscape architecture and planning practice in the Midwest. Over time, their work became increasingly far-ranging, in both its geographical scope and its project types. Between 1924 and 1955, Hare & Hare commissions included fifty-four cemeteries in fifteen states; numerous city and state parks (seventeen in Missouri alone); more than fifteen subdivisions in Salt Lake City; the Denver neighborhood of Belcaro Park; the picturesque grounds of the Christian Science Sanatorium in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts; and the University of Texas at Austin among fifty-one college and university campuses.

In Hare & Hare: Landscape Architects and City Planners Carol Grove and Cydney Millstein document the extraordinary achievements of this little-known firm and weave them into a narrative that spans from the birth of the late nineteenth-century "modern cemetery movement" to midcentury modernism. Through the figures of Sidney, a "homespun" amateur geologist who built a rustic family retreat called Harecliff, and his son Herbert, an urbane Harvard-trained landscape architect who traveled Europe and lived in a modern apartment building, Grove and Millstein chronicle the growth of the field from its amorphous Victorian beginnings to its coalescence as a profession during the first half of the twentieth century. Hare & Hare provides a unique and valuable parallel to studies of prominent East and West Coast landscape architecture firms--one that expands the reader's understanding of the history of American landscape architecture practice.

Review Quotes

Grove and Millstein's lively account is infused with the personalities of Sidney J. Hare, his son S. Herbert Hare, and the historical, social, and disciplinary contexts in which they were working. . . . Rather than provide a chronological account, Grove and Millstein wisely opted to elaborate on the various types of projects undertaken by Hare & Hare--including many overlapping, long-term undertakings--thus providing both depth and breadth to their narrative of this remarkable firm.--Caroline Constant "Missouri Historical Review"

The Hares' personal histories, fertile collaborations and impressive legacy are handsomely showcased in Hare & Hare, Landscape Architects and City Planners, a lost chapter in urban-design history brought to light by Carol Grove and Cydney Millstein.-- "Wall Street Journal"

About the Author

Carol Grove (Author)
CAROL GROVE is an adjunct assistant professor of American art at the University of Missouri, Columbia and the author of Henry Shaw's Victorian Landscapes: The Missouri Botanical Garden and Tower Grove Park.

Cydney Millstein (Author)
CYDNEY MILLSTEIN, founder and principal of Architectural & Historical Research in Kansas City, is the coauthor, with Carol Grove, of Houses of Missouri, 1870-1940.