Foundation for Architecture and Landscape Architecture (FALA), 1925-1935 | Lake Forest College Library Archives and Special Collections

Title: Foundation for Architecture and Landscape Architecture (FALA), 1925-1935

Created by: Garden Club of America. Lake Forest Garden Club (1912 to present)

The Lake Forest Garden Club, a successor to the Garden Club of Illinois (1912-22), had begun experimenting with an annual summer program on estate design in 1916, with a program led at Gorton School (now Gorton Center) for landscape design students to study estate development. In 1925, they introduced again at Gorton School an Institute of Landscape Architecture. Early club leaders included Harriet Hammond McCormick, Kate Brewster, and Tiffany Blake.

In 1926 this was succeeded by the Foundation for Architecture and Landscape Architecture with Ferruccio Vitale as its director. Vitale's program was modeled on the American Academy in Rome, with annual design competitions for annual Ryerson funded European traveling fellowships in both fields. The attendees were the top graduates in the architecture and landscape design from several institutions, including the universities of Michigan, Illinois, Iowa State, etc. and also the Harvard School of Design.

The participants sketched at notable local estates and collaborated on design problems, also meeting with visiting leaders in both fields. The winners of the competitions were awarded traveling fellowships in Europe (Ryerson) or in the U.S. (Conde Nast). The program continued through 1931, but was suspended, the Foundation finally closing down in 1935. Trustees were spouses often of LF Garden Club members or leading professionals, such as David Adler.

The program was housed at Lake Forest College each summer, though in the last year, 1931, the studio and study space was moved to the newly opened Lake Forest (town) Library, 361 E. Deerpath. In 1929 the President of Lake Forest, Herbert Moore, proposed building a new permanent home on campus for the Foundation, but the economic collapse of 1929 and following made this impossible.

In 1933, when the GCA visited Chicago (first year of the Century of Progress exhibition) as it had in 1919, the Lake Forest club produced a book that was a guide to gardens along the North shore, and reflecting a greater appreciation of t he landscape art than had the 1919 booklet. this reflected the impact on the club of the exposure from the FALA experience, summers 1926-31.Sources:
Foundation for Architecture and Landscape Architecture. Board of Trustees. Minutes, 1926-35.

Lake Forest College. Annual Report of the President, 1929.

Lake Forest Garden Club. Archives. On deposit, Lake Forest College library Special Collections.

Schnadelbach, R.Terry. Ferruccio Vitale: Landscape Architect of the Country Place Era. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001.

Arrangement: The small drawings are in two original boxes, apparently for their storage and perhaps shipment among participating graduate professional programs in the midwest and east. The bound minutes book is stored adjacent to these. The small number of large format plans and renderings, a few of the smaller ones encapsulated, are stored flat in the large flat storage case, Donnelley and Lee 003.

Extent: 6.0 Linear Feet

Finding Aid/Inventory
Series 1: Traveling exhibit, student and fellow small-format drawings, ca. late 1920s and early 1930s
Series 2: Renderings and plans, large format, by European Fellows, 1926-35
Series 3: Minutes book, Trustees, FALA, 1926-35

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Scope and Contents: This collection has three components: (1) a traveling exhibit from ca. 1930s of small drawings completed by FALA summer students and by traveling fellows, (2) four large-format plans and renderings of European subjects by fellows, and (3) a bound photocopy version (from the original at Ryerson Woods Conservation Center, Riverwoods) of the minute book of the FALA, 1925-35. This also includes articles published at the time by and about the program.

This is student work from the Lake Forest-based summer program and from the travels of fellows in this country and abroad. The local work was judged and along with some hypothetical projects by outside evaluators to select the winners of each year's competition. The annual competitions and shows, along with instruction and living arrangements, were on the Lake Forest College campus, 1925-30. This continued in 1931, except that instruction, storage, shows, etc. moved in 1931 to the newly-completed Lake Forest Library, on Deerpath east of McKinley Rd. As a result when the program died just before the 1932 session, the materials and collections remained there.

The Foundation was a project of the 1912-organized Lake Forest Garden Club, as the Garden Club of Illinois to 1922 and the westernmost founding member of the Garden Club of America. In 1922 the club broke into two, one for Lake Forest and one for Winnetka, and surrendered its name to a new umbrella entity Garden Club of Illinois. A similar program was first tried in the summer of 1916, under then landscape architecture instructor at the U. of Illinois Ralph Rodney Root. After the war and the economic downturn that followed the idea of a summer program was revived, again with U. of Illinois involvement, but this time under Professor of Landscape Architecture Stanley White. Many of the FALA trustees were LF Garden Club member spouses. When the summer programs appeared unlikely to revive after 1931 and with the decline in demand for estate design professionals, the program disbanded in 1935, with the Ryerson traveling fellowship endowment transfered to the U. of Illinois Landscape architecture program.