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One of Americas greatest landscape designers and conser...)
One of Americas greatest landscape designers and conservationists, Jensen used native plants to introduce the influential Prairie style of landscape architecture. In Siftings, Jensen shares his memories of "wandering in many lands" and his life in the heart of Middle America. His recollections―like his designs―express a love of natural landscapes and regional cultures. As he sifts through a lifetime of ideas about gardens, cities, towns and parks, Jensen makes an eloquent case for a natural style of American landscape.
Jens Jensen was a Danish-American landscape architect. His public and private works, mostly in the U. S. Midwest, are marked by harmonious use of natural terrain and native flora.
Background
Jensen was born on September 13, 1860, near Dybbøl, Denmark, the son of Christian and Maria Jensen. His parents belonged to the landed gentry, and the most important early influence upon him was certainly the magnificent landscape of farmland and fjord that he knew as a boy.
Education
As an eldest son Jensen was destined to take over the family farm and received his education at folk high schools in Vinding and Tune in Jutland, north of the new border established after the Danish war of 1864 against Prussia and Austria.
Career
Jensen first came into contact with sophisticated landscape architecture during his compulsory tour of military service in Berlin, and this experience, combined with family frictions and political unrest, caused him to imigrate to the United States in 1884. He married, and after brief periods on farms in Florida and Iowa, in 1886 Jensen and his wife settled in Chicago, where Jensen took a laborer's job with the West Park Commission.
During the next fourteen years he worked hard and rose to the position of superintendent of Humboldt Park, one of the largest parks on the west side of the city. During these years he and his family spent much time botanizing in the country around Chicago. In 1900, however, Jensen was dismissed from his job with the parks as a result of his successful exposure of a grafting contractor. More than any other major artist of his time, Jensen was involved in municipal politics, and since these were exceedingly corrupt in Chicago, his career was a turbulent one.
As a consequence of a wave of municipal reform in 1907, Jensen came back into the West Parks as superintendent and landscape architect and in the next few years accomplished the redesign of Humboldt, Garfield, and Douglas parks. Columbus Park, which was added to the system in 1915, is considered his masterpiece. He also proposed an extension of the system in 1918; unfortunately the plan, which would have made an immense difference to the entire west side of the city, was never executed.
Disgusted by municipal politics, Jensen retired from the West Parks in 1920, and for the next fifteen years devoted himself to private practice. He enjoyed great popularity throughout the Midwest. In the north-shore suburbs of Chicago he landscaped the Ryerson, Kuppenheimer, Becker, Bensinger, and Florsheim estates, and in the Detroit area he did a large amount of work for the Ford family. In addition to landscaping Henry Ford's estate at Dearborn, he completed three projects for Ford's son and did the highly successful landscaping of the company's display at the Chicago Fair of 1933. There were also numerous commissions in small and medium-sized cities throughout the Midwest and a series of memorable places near Lexington, Kentucky. Not all of his projects were large; some involved only an acre or two. Jensen thought of his art as analogous to music, comparing his smaller works to folksongs and the great estates to symphonies. Finally he continued to do a certain amount of public work; in this field his most successful single achievement was unquestionably the Lincoln Memorial Gardens in Springfield, Illinois.
Jensen's wife died in 1934, and two years later he carried through a long-cherished ambition to retire to northern Wisconsin and found a school. He selected an area of remarkable beauty on Ellison Bay on the north shore of the Door County peninsula and there established the interesting institution known as The Clearing. Although it was often compared to Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin Foundation, the two institutions had really very little in common. Jensen refused to use his students as draftsmen, and he did not believe that his art could be taught. His students benefited from contact with him, but the school's emphasis was on the students' pursuit of their own individual crafts and skills and, most important of all, on the contemplation of nature. As well as participating in the school, Jensen also carried on a small practice and traveled extensively throughout the Midwest lecturing on behalf of conservation. He put together a small volume of essays in an attempt to present his thoughts to the public in a permanent form. While these writings have their devoted readers, The Clearing, as he entitled the collection, was not a major success; part of the difficulty unquestionably lay in Jensen's handling of the English language, which he spoke eloquently but wrote indifferently. The Clearing is now administered by the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation. Jensen died there at the age of ninety-one.
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One of Americas greatest landscape designers and conser...)
Views
Jensen evolved his distinctive theory of the prairie landscape, which was closely related to the new architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and his followers.
In the years 1900-1907 Jensen established his principles of landscape art in a series of private estates now entirely destroyed. He emphasized the importance of local plant materials and insisted upon extreme purity in the handling of space, rock work, and water. In his mature work he rejected all formalism and may thus be regarded as the last great exponent of the tradition of romantic landscape architecture that began in the eighteenth century with Lancelot Brown and Humphrey Repton and extended through the nineteenth century with Jean Charles Adolphe Alphand and Hermann von Puckler-Muskau.
Connections
On October 27, 1884, shortly after his arrival to the United States, Jensen married his Danish fiancée, Anne Marie Hansen. In 1886 the couple settled in Chicago. Jensen's wife died in 1934.