Description

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.