Fletcher Steele

Architect, Deceased Person

1885 – 1971

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Who was Fletcher Steele?

Fletcher Steele was an American landscape architect credited with designing and creating over 700 gardens from 1915 to the time of his death.

Steele was born John Fletcher Steele in Rochester, New York, United States to a lawyer father and pianist mother, graduated from Williams College in 1907, and promptly joined the young landscape architecture program at Harvard University where Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. was one of his professors. In 1908 Steele left Harvard to accept an apprenticeship with Warren H. Manning.

In 1913 Steele embarked on a four-month tour of Europe to study European designs. Upon his return to America, he opened his own practice. His early garden plans are generally in the English Arts and crafts style of Gertrude Jekyll, Reginald Blomfield, and T. H. Mawson, but ornamented with Italianate detailing such as balustrades, hedges, urns, statuary, stone pineapples, and flights of water steps. During World War I, Steele served in the American Red Cross in Europe. After war's end he regularly returned in summers.

His conversion to an Art Deco style began in 1925 when he visited the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes and saw its examples of cubist gardens with mirrors, concrete and coloured gravel. By 1930 Steele was writing with enthusiasm of André Véra, Tony Garnier, and Gabriel Guevrekian.

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Born
Jun 7, 1885
Rochester
Profession
Education
  • Harvard University
  • Williams College
Died
Jul 1, 1971

Submitted
on July 23, 2013

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