fertile minds:
barney voigt and the birth of the hollin hills landscape
by stephen brookes
How do you build a modernist landscape? Easy: get a bunch of young, urban intellectuals together, and hand them shovels.
Ask any Hollin Hiller what they love about the place, and you’ll usually hear “the architecture” or “the landscape” – or, more likely, both. It’s hard to separate the two; our light, open houses seem to nest with perfect naturalness in a canopy of trees, like part of the landscape itself. A walk through Hollin Hills can feel like a stroll through a quiet and verdant park, and we look out our glass walls into a gorgeous sea of green.
But a glance out those same glass walls in the early 1950’s might not have been so dazzling. Hollin Hills was a work in progress then, and the first views usually included mud, construction debris, and acres of naked, sun-baked houses. It wasn’t as bleak as most construction sites; developer Robert Davenport and architect Charles Goodman tried to preserve the wooded hillsides as they built, and Goodman thought trees were “the most valuable assets on a building lot.”
But a good part of the terrain was open and virtually treeless farmland; Frank Collins, who moved to Marthas Road in 1951, remembers it as “pretty barren,” and early resident George Brickelmaier bemoaned the landscape as “nothing but bare dirt all around.”
Ok – maybe “nothing” is a bit strong, but it was pretty close. Goodman warned new homeowners to expect only “a basic minimum of landscaping” – which meant that work areas next to the new houses got a sprinkling of fertilizer and grass seed, while most of the lot was left “entirely untouched.” Davenport tried to jolly up this bare-bones approach, telling residents that it should give them “a real incentive to take over from there.” But the message was clear: If they wanted a view out those big new windows, they were going to have to pick up a shovel and build it themselves.
a tabula rasa
It’s not that Goodman and Davenport thought landscaping was unimportant – exactly the opposite. Goodman despised what he called “the formal aridity and conventionalism” of the American suburb, and sited these new houses to fit naturally into the rolling hills, rather than just bulldozing the land and plopping them down on a grid.
“We do not believe that we can improve on nature,” he said in 1949, adding that he wanted “to integrate the requirements of twentieth century living with the natural beauties of the variegated site.” He kept trees when he could, tried to optimize views, and connected the indoors with the outdoors though his innovative walls of glass. The result, he hoped, would create a “park-like” atmosphere and “a setting of unaffected repose.”
But Goodman and Davenport had a problem. They needed to make the houses affordable to ordinary families, which meant offering almost no landscaping. But on the other hand, the landscape was too important to be left to amateurs (who might, after all, just opt for the hated “conventionalism”). So they came up with a bold and innovative approach: Provide each new homeowner with an individualized landscape plan that would also create a modern, integrated look for the entire community – and then let the residents pay for the implementation themselves.
enter barney voigt
The landscape architect they picked for the role was Lou Bernard “Barney” Voigt. It was an inspired choice. Still in his mid-thirties, Voigt may have been as innovative a thinker as Goodman himself, and was steeped in the same modernist ideals. With an MLA from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Voigt had taught landscape architecture in the early 1940’s at Black Mountain College in North Carolina – a hothouse for the world’s avant-garde artists and thinkers – and had created a landscape plan for the campus. That led to several government projects and a position at the National Capital Parks Planning Division, where Goodman found him in 1949 and hired him to work on Hollin Hills.
Voigt shared Goodman’s hatred of conventionalism, rejecting the “formal aridity” of the suburban landscape with its fences and rigid dividing lines. Taking what he called an “experimental” approach, he used organic, free-flowing designs to mask property lines and create a sense of unity. With Hollin Hills, he said, he would try “to tie one lot into the other to make the community look as if there were no individual lots, but a beautiful park.”
And, like Goodman, Voigt believed that architecture could enhance peoples’ lives, while simultaneously creating a sense of community. “When I meet with residents to ascertain their likes and dislikes,” he said in a 1951 interview, “I try to act as an agent between the owners and the community. I just try to think in terms of the whole. Individuality I encourage, even stress, where it will not mar the effectiveness of the whole.”
Voigt quickly got the project rolling, completing his first known plan in 1949 for a house on Rippon Road. Initially, the plans were optional; Davenport offered them to homeowners for $100, including a one-hour consultation with Voigt. But in June of 1950, Davenport began including mandatory plans in the cost of each new house, to ensure that the community evolved into what he called a “coherent whole.”
the landscape plans
Bobbie Seligmann remembers Voigt well. Shortly after she and her late husband Al bought their home on Recard Lane in 1952, the landscape architect came out to inspect the site. “Mr. Voigt was very insistent on knowing what we wanted,” she says with a laugh, “but we had never owned a house – and we knew nothing about gardening!”
Seventy years later, she still has the original plan Voigt drew for them. A yellowing sheet about 2’ by 3’, it shows thick banks of azaleas and broad-leafed evergreens (a favorite of Voigt’s) sweeping through the sloping site, anchored by a patio that Voigt had first outlined on the ground for them with a garden hose. It’s no mere sketch; the plan is detailed, thorough and precise, specifying exactly which plants to use, and where each should be placed. And the easy, encompassing flow of the plantings – as well as their connection to the architecture – is vividly clear.
These elements – meticulous detail, a list of specific plants, respect for homeowners’s needs, natural flow of plantings, and connection to the architecture – are the hallmarks of all of Voigt’s plans. And the plans are exceptionally pragmatic as well, prioritizing shade and privacy for the exposed homes while upholding, even enhancing, their architectural lines.
“In a house as open as this one,” he wrote of one Marthas Road house in 1953, “trees for shade and scale become as important as the very walls of the house itself. The branches of the trees extend the roof line for a protective canopy of shade, and the shrub planting … allows the house to extend to the edge of the garden.”
Voigt felt that, like architecture, landscape should not just be beautiful, but also serve human needs. Decades before the idea of “outdoor rooms” became common, Voigt focused on what he called “the creation of beautiful and useful garden areas.” His plans show not just plants and pathways, but carefully-sited sandboxes, clotheslines, play areas, slides, fireplaces, bird baths, fountains, vegetable gardens, swimming pools, even a badminton court. There are tool sheds and woodworking shops, incinerators and “plank terraces,” swings and picnic areas and a dozen other improvements, all deftly arranged and integrated with the interiors – and all designed to make life better.
the fledgling gardeners of hollin hills
So how did the early pioneers of Hollin Hills respond to these often quite complex plans? “The young intellectuals, mostly from urban backgrounds, who made up the bulk of Hollin Hills homeowners, had little previous interest in or knowledge of horticulture,” remembered original settler Marion Tiger. And with little money to buy plants or hire landscape contractors, she added, “arming such people with drawings, plant lists, spades and shovels seemed almost foolhardy.”
But then, apparently inspired by Voigt’s vision and by the plans themselves, the “young intellectuals” – including Al Seligmann, then a fledgling diplomat at the State Department – just picked up shovels and began to dig.
Bobbie Seligmann with her original Voigt plan
“Al knew nothing about gardening,” remembers Bobbie. “But he said, ‘give me a book and I’ll learn.’ And he loved it – he liked to be mired in the mud!”
Voigt’s plan served as a practical, step-by-step road map for the Seligmanns. They glued the paper to two sheets of wood, hinged so it would open like a book, to make it easier to use as they gardened. And over the next two years, they implemented nearly the entire design, marking each new plant with a red dot. Today, that original plan is nearly covered with those red dots – and the landscaping remains astonishingly intact. Banks of azaleas still sweep gracefully through the sloping site, embracing the house and patio and providing elegant views from every room.
“arming such people with drawings, plant lists, and shovels seemed almost foolhardy”
The zeal for gardening began to spread, as neighbors shared experiences, advice and tools. A Garden Club was formed in 1952 (well before there were streetlights or even fire hydrants in Hollin Hills), and Voigt himself was an ongoing presence, visiting the community two or three times a week and offering guidance on “How to implement your landscape plan” in a series of articles in the Newsletter.
And just as Voigt’s plans were designed to integrate Hollin Hills physically, they generated a sense of human community as well, as residents bonded over the challenges of growing anything in their compacted, clay-filled earth.
The Reindell family, gardening together
“We often met in each other’s yards as we exchanged ideas,” Liz Coffin remembered a few years ago. “There was no end to our excitement at the challenges. Bob Coe, a Harvard-trained landscape architect, was always ready with advice for the novices. Each spring he trundled his wheelbarrow full of plantings or a small tree down Rebecca Drive to offer additions to our sparse gardens.”
And Bobbie Seligmann recalls how her neighbors on Recard Lane would pool resources. “We had our own little co-op,” she says. “We shared our gardening tools, because no one had any – it was a big expense!”
henry stabler, gardening angel
The young residents were so intent on saving money that Davenport, at one point, had to ask them to “refrain from gathering holly, dogwoods and blossoms” from his work sites. He tried to help out a bit, selling low-cost azaleas and rhododendrons from the Hollin Hills sales office, and giving them away freely at Christmas. (If you were wondering why there are so many azaleas here, now you know.)
But a much bigger help to the fledgling gardeners turned out to be a solitary, erudite and rather eccentric character named Henry Stabler, who lived without phone or electricity on a “wild and disorderly” nursery in the country. Stabler became a key resource for the new gardeners, dispensing advice and supplying them with wild-grown trees and shrubs at bargain prices, driving them to Hollin Hills on a flatbed truck so he could plant them himself.
Above: Henry Stabler delivering plants to Hollin Hills, 1950s
Woodcut by Kathleen Spagnolo
“To those of us starving for cool shadows in our naked lots, his specialty of delivering a mature tree to our yards with a guarantee of live success was a godsend,” remembered Liz Coffin. “He charged very little because he wanted a ‘good home’ for his pets. He seemed especially fond of the eager young couples buying the contemporary houses that Charles Goodman had designed.”
Buying from Stabler was no easy matter, though. “You never knew when he would be at his nursery – you just had to go and hope he was there,” says Bobbie Seligmann. And he had to like you, or he wouldn’t sell to you. “We’d go out with brownies,” she says with a laugh, “to bribe him.”
Predictably, perhaps, relations between Voigt and his clients weren’t always smooth. Hollin Hills was “a community crowded with intellectuals delighting in debate and impatient with restraint,” as Marvin Bloom wrote in 1984, and many of them took Voigt’s meticulous plans as mere suggestions, altering them at will. Voigt didn’t always take it well.
“I see so much sloppy work and misuse of good materials in direct violation to the landscape plans, I am beginning to wonder what is wrong,” he fumed in the Bulletin in 1952. “It has been my job to develop a pattern, with your cooperation, to create a landscape worthy of you and your house. It cannot be done by the parsimonious, whimsical, or petulant creations I now see on the slopes of Hollin Hills.”
Despite the scolding, Voigt remained a well-liked and respected figure, and when he passed away suddenly in 1953 at the age of 37, it was a genuine tragedy; the community renamed what was then Rippon Park in his honor. The landscaping project continued: Davenport brought in Dan Kiley (and later Eric Paepcke) to replace Voigt, and continued to provide plans (and azaleas) to homeowners until the last Hollin Hills house was finished in 1971.
voigt’s legacy
Did Voigt’s vision of a unified landscape become a reality? It’s impossible to say how many of his plans (there were over 100 of them) were actually implemented – but enough, as Marion Tiger noted in 1984, “to bring the community fairly close to the integrated landscape effect envisioned by Voigt.” They even got national attention in 1957, when the magazine Popular Gardening ran an article titled “The Garden and the Glass House” that raved over Voigt’s designs.
And now, though only traces remain of most of his original gardens, it’s clear that Voigt’s innovative ideas – and Davenport’s radical decision to include a plan with every new house – set Hollin Hills on the path to its current distinctive look. There’s little of the “formal aridity and conventionalism” of suburbia that Goodman and Voigt so despised, and as landscape architect Dennis Carmichael writes in his eloquent essay, A Landscape of Democracy, the striking unity of the man-made, architectural landscape with the natural landscape “distinguishes Hollin Hills from most neighborhoods, historic or contemporary.” Voigt’s intent, he says, “was to blur the boundaries between the private and the public realm, allowing the greenery to wash over the entire neighborhood, enveloping the houses in its embrace.”
But perhaps the real genius of the project lay in the way Voigt’s plans planted the seeds for a generation of unlikely young gardeners, inspiring them to create both a new landscape and a new community.
“The provision of a fully-developed plan with all of the needed elements – gardens, patio, play yard, et cetera – plus a very sophisticated and layered planting plan with actual plants specified, was the catalyst needed to have our neighborhood take on such a different landscape character than those around us built about the same time,” says landscape architect Elisabeth Lardner, of Marthas Road. “The plans were an amazing educational tool, and even if not implemented in full, the results are visible throughout the community – and provide great value to us today.”
What would Voigt himself think of today’s Hollin Hills? Shortly before he died, he encouraged Hollin Hillers to think deeply about the importance and meaning of this new landscape they were creating.
“When these gardens begin to reach maturity,” he wrote, “they will be like a mirror reflecting the richness or poverty of the lives within.”
— Stephen Brookes